If you’re thinking about ending your costly relationship with Oracle, you’re not alone. One of the most common questions we hear from customers is, “How do I get off Oracle?”
Leaving Oracle for Postgres may seem challenging, but it’s much easier with the right tools and support. EDB’s Senior Product Managers Matt Lewandowski and Tim Boutin, recently highlighted some of the tools and best practices for a successful Oracle to Postgres migration in our Love at First Query webinar. You can watch the webinar here or read on for a recap.
Why break up with Oracle?
Complicated contracts, disruptive audits, and being locked in from a resource and cost perspective are a few of the many reasons organizations consider leaving Oracle. Sometimes a company's partners or even their own customers want them to move off Oracle and onto Postgres.
Postgres’ ability to run on various platforms and support a very high threshold of transactions is driving adoptions across industries like financial services, insurance, and more. There are lots of success stories that show how top companies successfully transitioned off of Oracle, minimized their downtime, and started innovating in a way that hadn’t been possible with their legacy database.
Oracle software is built for legacy applications. But in the survey we conducted during our Oracle migration webinar, 65% of respondents noted that their organizations are using AI. This requires shifting from traditional ways of building software to modern ways using microservices, agile development framework and more.
Why Postgres is winning the database game
Modernizing legacy applications and adopting open source technologies are top priorities for organizations today. Migrating from Oracle to Postgres supports both these critical initiatives.
It’s been estimated that 70% or more of new apps use open source, and enterprises are deploying Postgres on multi-cloud and containers to quickly adopt modern architectures. Postgres runs on virtually every platform and every cloud, OS and hardware platform, and its small footprint and modest resource requirements makes it an ideal solution for today's containers.
Developers have long seen the benefits of Postgres. 49% of respondents chose Postgres as their preferred database in the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
Postgres stands out due to its thriving, dynamic community of developers and users – a community EDB is proud to participate in. While we're the leading contributor to PostgreSQL code, what truly makes this ecosystem unique is that our developers are among thousands of members working together. This collaborative open source model is precisely what can liberate you from the cycle of vendor lock-in with Oracle.
Breaking up with Oracle can be hard to do
Although many organizations are eager to transition from Oracle to Postgres, many hesitate due to concerns about the complexities and risks involved, such as:
- Compatibility and migration complexity
- Performance and optimization requirements
- Integration and application incompatibilities
- Complicated Oracle licenses
- Time required to migrate
- Loss of investment in Oracle training and expertis
Overcoming migration challenges
The Oracle transition is achievable with:
- Solutions that minimize code changes and tool transitions
- The ability to maintain or improve current performance levels after migration
- Solutions that leverage existing skills and provide smooth onboarding
- An understanding of which portions of your portfolio are ready for migration
Meet your migration needs with EDB
At EDB, we’ve helped thousands of companies handle migration complexities, and we’re here for you too. Rest assured that even if you have Oracle-specific applications, much of your portfolio is likely migration-ready. We can help you assess complexity, identify suitable migration candidates, and develop strategies that leverage your team's existing skills while ensuring a smooth transition to Postgres.
Our migration tools and solutions can help you:
- Reduce application rewrites up to 95%. Our Oracle-compatible features minimize the impact on Tier 1 applications and drastically decrease the need for database and application code modifications. Our SPL language syntactically mirrors Oracle’s PL/ SQL language, so many of your databases don’t need to be rewritten but can simply work as is.
- Meet strategic migration initiatives faster. Combine EDB support with specialized tools to migrate most Oracle databases in less than 20 days.
- Improve operational agility and reduce overhead. Deploy enterprise-grade Postgres AI for open source flexibility, hardened security, and up to 99.999% availability.
- Leverage deployment flexibility. Deploy across all environments, whether hybrid, bare metal, virtual machines, Kubernetes/containers, private cloud, or self-managed public cloud. Need a fully managed solution? Our EDB Postgres AI Cloud Service provides complete database management without the operational overhead.
- Achieve up to 80% TCO reduction. Reduce migration risk and save on total cost of ownership (TCO) by using EDB’s Migration Assessment tool in our Hybrid Control Plane to determine which databases to migrate first. Our comprehensive toolkit helps transfer data and verify migration success.
- Maintain enterprise-grade security. Safeguard app and customer data with Transparent Data Encryption, SQL protection, audit trails, and data redaction. Leverage role-based access control (RBAC) and fine-grained data access security mechanisms.
- Ease the transition for team members. Those familiar with Oracle tools and syntax can continue using similar commands while gradually learning Postgres-specific approaches.
Getting started
Once you've decided to migrate, there are a number of steps to take, from determining which applications you’ll migrate, to migrating the database, optimizing your system, and completing the cutover.
It may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. We recommend breaking down the journey into three manageable phases: the assessment phase, the data migration phase and the application phase. You can leverage tools and assistance for every phase.
Once your database is up and running, you can use operational tools to back up your database, maintain high availability, replicate data and more, to ensure your data is secure and fully usable by your enterprise.
Get support when you need it
From migration strategy development and environment setup assistance to free training programs, EDB’s professional services are designed to support your Postgres journey. As the only vendor providing Postgres certification, we help ensure your team has verifiable technical competence to manage your databases effectively.
Our technical account managers work closely with you to understand your specific needs and ensure they're reflected in our feature development. For organizations preferring to outsource database management, our Remote DBA services can expertly maintain and optimize your Postgres environment.
How to get started
We offer several free resources to help you begin your Oracle to Postgres migration:
- Oracle Migration Calculator - Enter your metrics to get a rough time frame estimate.
- Comprehensive documentation – Receive technical guidance with documents on a wide range of topics.
- EDB Migration AI copilot – Get assistance with the schema assessment of DDL files.
- Free training programs – Build your team's expertise with our online learning platform.
- Oracle to Postgres white paper – See detailed migration strategies for successfully migrating your legacy database.
Unlock powerful business outcomes through database modernization
Migrating from legacy databases isn’t just a trend, but a strategic business move that can enable you to:
- Grow revenue: Increase ROI, release legacy licensing budget, and get to market quickly with new apps and services to beat the competition.
- Innovate faster: Capitalize on new transactional, analytical and AI workloads and enable engineers to move faster with open source and cloud-native technologies.
- Operate efficiently: Zero-risk migrations reduce TCO, expand deployment options, and promote the development of AI and omni-data applications.
With EDB by your side, your journey from Oracle to Postgres is within reach, and the transition can be smoother than you might expect. You can watch the webinar here to learn more. Once you unleash open source and unlock the full potential of your technology and your people with Postgres, you won’t want to look back!