We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.

To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.

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ifwinterco 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

We should really be more thankful for the existence of PostgreSQL

	▲	abalashov 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, although a lot of the most advanced PostgreSQL features that would bear comparison in this discussion are relatively recent. PostgreSQL didn't have them in the 2000s, either, and where it did, the ergonomics were much worse than they are today.
	▲	timcambrant 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I use Patroni (https://github.com/patroni/patroni) (no affiliation to me) which is a really nice and reliable PostgreSQL distribution that provides automatic failover and not just active-standby nodes with manual failover. As I understand it, you would have to script a separate watchdog process for the basic PostgreSQL, to get high availability.
	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Still lacks several features, or you have to pay as well for parity.

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bigfatkitten 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Salesforce have been building an Oracle replacement based on Postgres for years, named Sayonara and as far as I know, it’s not ready yet.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/salesforce_replace_or...