Oracle vs. PostgreSQL
Oracle is undoubtedly the most well known database provider in the world and most would argue that it’s the most feature-rich and reliable database system money can buy. As the saying goes “No-one ever got sacked for buying IBM”. This could easily be applied to Oracle – many large companies and institutions will use Oracle as their corporate database and have all of their third party applications using it as a back-end.
When it comes to storing GIS data in a central repository the obvious choice tends to be Oracle as the policy is to put all data into the corporate database and Oracle comes with spatial capabilities. So it’s a no brainer, isn’t it?
Well Oracle has been around for a quite a number of years now and is currently on version 12, and the size of the installation is vast compared to other database systems. Some would consider this bloatware. It may have a vast amount of options and features available but how many of these are really used?
Cost also comes into the argument, Oracle is not cheap, whether it is a single licence or a site licence, and of course you’ll need to employ an Oracle Database Administrator(s) to look after the system on a daily basis. Our experience is that even a small installation needs constant attention just to have it up and running without any issues.
So what do we want from our ideal database?
What we’re looking for is a database system that isn’t overly burdened with features that add little value; is cheap to maintain; is cheap to purchase; is reliable; provides good performance and spatial awareness.
We have found that PostgreSQL/PostGIS fulfils and exceeds all of the above criteria. For a start it’s free; if you’re worried about support then there are many companies that will provide support for PostgreSQL, including Dotted Eyes; you don’t need a DBA constantly monitoring it to make sure it’s up and running. We have lots of our solutions running PostgreSQL on 24/7 system that require little or no maintenance. Performance is outstanding, in many cases much faster than Oracle (benchmarking we have done on the same physical hardware). PostGIS provides a much more feature rich spatial experience than Oracle, plus PostGIS has many more built in spatial functions.
In terms of Enterprise functionality (clustering, replications, big data) – Oracle of course provides these, but then so does the PostgreSQL community. Clustering is a free third party add on, replication comes free with the latest version (9), and big data is an area of great interest and there are many third party vendors providing this functionality again significantly cheaper and faster than Oracle.
So why would you want Oracle?
Written by Steve Davies, Senior Software Engineer at Dotted Eyes (24th July 2013)