Oracle to Postgres: Compatibility and Migrating Tools

High Oracle total cost of ownership trap

Oracle’s high total cost of ownership reflects restrictive and complicated contracts that often lead organizations into a financial dilemma, limiting their budget for innovation and growth. Businesses may be compelled to pay for expensive services like support and maintenance. Additionally, pricing lists and tiers aren’t easy to understand, potentially leading to runaway costs.

Lack of agility and deployment options

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, 70% of new applications are developed using open source technologies. This trend pushes enterprises to deploy PostgreSQL across multi-cloud environments and containers, enabling them to quickly adapt modern architectures and meet market demands. The flexibility of PostgreSQL allows organizations to innovate more freely, responding swiftly to changes without the constraints present in legacy systems.

Innovation and future-proofing

Oracle’s proprietary and costly innovation strategies create significant barriers for organizations aiming to embrace new technologies. Conversely, PostgreSQL provides an adaptable framework that integrates diverse workloads – including transactional, analytical, and AI workloads – into a cohesive and cost-effective solution. This flexibility empowers businesses to streamline their operations and make the most of modern advancements without the limitations of legacy systems. By choosing PostgreSQL, organizations can harness the latest advancements in technology without being bogged down by legacy constraints.

IT consolidation

In the quest to streamline IT expenditures, organizations should focus on a fewer number of platforms. PostgreSQL effectively accommodates a wide array of workloads, making it an ideal choice for businesses looking to consolidate their database environments. This consolidation not only reduces costs, but also simplifies management and optimizes performance across varying operational needs.

• Innovation ceilings: Legacy applications like Oracle have ceilings for innovation, limiting data value and perpetuating vendor lock-in. These constraints hinder businesses from leveraging cutting-edge technologies that could transform their operations.
• Inability to meet Operator requirements: App developers, data engineers, architects, and data scientists increasingly demand open standards and interoperability. Oracle may have a less developer-friendly interface and contemporary cloud deployment models, putting organizations at a disadvantage.
• Deployment challenges: Oracle's architecture cannot support modern multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, preventing businesses from adapting to the evolving landscape of IT deployments that require agility and flexibility.

Organizations have a variety of deployment options to consider when migrating from Oracle to Postgres, allowing them to select the best-fit architecture for their specific needs.

• On-premise deployments: This approach gives businesses full control over their databases, with configurations factoring in physical servers, virtual machines (VMs) and containerised environments using Kubernetes. On-premise deployments can be tailored to meet unique requirements while leveraging existing infrastructure.
• Kubernetes/Containers: Containerization facilitates scalable and agile application development. By deploying Postgres within containers, organizations can achieve rapid updates and ensure consistent environments across development and production.
• Public cloud – self managed: Organizations can choose to manage their own Postgres instances in the public cloud, providing flexibility and control while benefiting from the cloud's inherent scalability and resource availability.
• Public cloud – managed service: Utilizing EDB's cloud database service, such as the EDB Postgres AI Cloud Service, simplifies the deployment and management of Postgres databases. This service provides a hands-off approach, with many essential tasks for operating and maintaining the database handled by the EDB managed service. This allows organizations to focus on their core business objectives while ensuring that their database infrastructure is robust and well-maintained.
• Hybrid deployments: A hybrid approach combines both on-premise and cloud resources, allowing organizations to optimise their database performance while ensuring compliance and data locality in critical applications. This flexibility enables enterprises to adapt to changing business requirements seamlessly.

Through these varied deployment models, organizations can effectively transition from Oracle to Postgres, ensuring that their operations remain agile and aligned with modern technological standards.

Successful migrations from Oracle to Postgres often hinge on leveraging specific product features that facilitate this transition and ensure optimal performance.

• Cloud modernization and agility support
  The ability to adopt flexible deployment strategies is crucial for today’s dynamic business environment. Solutions that enable cloud and multi-cloud strategies, along with fully managed Database as a Service (DBaaS), empower organizations to swiftly adapt to changing demands.
• Postgres database security features
  Enhanced security measures play a vital role in securing data during and post-migration. Features such as Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), Data Masking, Password Profiles, SQL Protect and robust auditing functionalities ensure that sensitive information remains safe, while facilitating compliance with regulatory standards.
• High availability
  Ensuring that Postgres solutions provide geo-distributed cluster support across multi-cloud platforms is fundamental. Achieving the highest levels of availability (up to 99.999%) safeguards business continuity and boosts confidence in migrated systems.

Focusing on these critical product features not only streamlines the migration process, but also fortifies the operational integrity of the enterprise environment in the long run.

Migrating from Oracle to Postgres can present unexpected complexities that organizations may not initially envision. To navigate these challenges effectively, leveraging professional services designed specifically for Oracle to Postgres migrations can significantly enhance success rates.

Assessing, prioritizing and planning migrations
Professional services can facilitate a thorough assessment of existing Oracle environments, prioritizing which databases to migrate based on business value and operational considerations. This structured planning helps organizations define their migration strategy and timeline, ensuring a smooth transition to Postgres.

Postgres subject matter expertise
Having access to Postgres experts can provide invaluable support. These specialists can assist internal Database Administrators with best practices, troubleshooting issues and optimizing the database environment post-migration, ultimately leading to higher performance and reliability.

High performance analytics and database consolidation
Professional services can also aid in the analytics phase by consolidating organizational data assets effectively. This not only streamlines operations but enhances data accessibility and reporting capabilities within the new Postgres environment, enabling better decision-making.

Maintenance of high availability, security and multi-tenancy standards
Ensuring that newly migrated databases meet high availability, security and multi-tenancy requirements is crucial. Professional services can provide the necessary frameworks and best practices to maintain these standards throughout the migration process, fostering confidence in the new system's robustness and compliance.