Disclaimer: I work part time on the DB team.

You could also consider renting an Oracle DB. Yep! Consider some unintuitive facts:

• It can be cheaper to use Oracle than MongoDB. There are companies that have migrated away from Mongo to Oracle to save money. This idea violates some of HN's most sacred memes, but there you go. Cloud databases are things you always pay for, even if they're based on open source code.

• Oracle supports NoSQL features including the MongoDB protocol. You can use the Mongo GUI tools to view and edit your data. Starting with NoSQL is very easy as a consequence.

• But... it also has "JSON duality views". You start with a collection of JSON documents and the database not only works out your JSON schemas through data entropy analysis, but can also refactor your documents into relational tables behind the scenes whilst preserving the JSON/REST oriented view e.g. with optimistic locking using etags. Queries on JSON DVs become SQL queries that join tables behind the scenes so you get the benefits of both NoSQL and SQL worlds (i.e. updating a sub-object in one place updates it in all places cheaply).

• If your startup has viral growth you won't have db scaling issues because Oracle DBs scale horizontally, and have a bunch of other neat performance tricks like automatically adding indexes you forgot you needed, you can materialize views, there are high performance transactional message queues etc.

So you get a nice smooth scale-up and transition from ad hoc "stuff some json into the db and hope for the best" to well typed data with schemas and properly normalized forms that benefit from all the features of SQL.

▲ alexisread 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good points, but Postgres has all those, along with much better local testing story, easier and more reliable CDC, better UDFs (in Python, Go etc.), a huge ecosystem of extensions for eg. GIS data, no licencing issues ever, API compatability with DuckDB, Doris and other DBs, and (this is the big one) is not Oracle.

	▲	sgarland 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Unless I’ve missed something, Postgres doesn’t have automatic index creation, nor does it have JSON introspection to automatically convert it to a normalized schema (which is insane; I love it). It also doesn’t do any kind of sharding on its own, though of course forks like Citus exist. It definitely doesn’t do RAC / Exadata (not sure which part this falls under), where multiple nodes are connected and use RDMA to treat a bunch of SSDs as local storage. I love Postgres, and am not a huge fan of Oracle as a corporation, but I can’t deny that their RDBMS has some truly astounding capabilities.
	▲	rezonant 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You had me at "is not Oracle"

▲ tracker1 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I generally limit Oracle to where you are in a position to have a dedicated team to the design, deployment and management of just database operations. I'm not really a fan of Oracle in general, but if you're in a position to spend upwards of $1m/yr or more for dedicated db staff, then it's probably worth considering.

Even then, PostgreSQL and even MS-SQL are often decent alternatives for most use cases.

▲ mike_hearn 9 hours ago | parent [-]

That was true years ago but these days there's the autonomous database offering, where DB operations are almost all automated. You can rent them in the cloud and you just get the connection strings/wallet and go. Examples of stuff it automates: backups, scaling up/down, (as mentioned) adding indexes automatically, query plan A/B testing to catch bad replans, you can pin plans if you need to, rolling upgrades without downtime, automated application of security patches (if you want that), etc.

So yeah running a relational DB used to be quite high effort but it got a lot better over time.

▲ tracker1 9 hours ago | parent [-]

At that point, you can say the same for PostgreSQL, which is more broadly supported across all major and minor cloud platforms with similar features and I'm assuming a lower cost and barrier of entry. This is without signing with Oracle, Inc... which tends to bring a lot of lock-in behaviors that come with those feature sets.

TBF, I haven't had to use Oracle in about a decade at this point... so I'm not sure how well it competes... My experiences with the corporate entity itself leave a lot to be desired, let alone just getting setup/started with local connectivity has always been what I considered extremely painful vs common alternatives. MS-SQL was always really nice to get setup, but more recently has had a lot of difficulties, in particular with docker/dev instances and more under arm (mac) than alternatives.

I'm a pretty big fan of PG, which is, again, very widely available and supported.

▲ mike_hearn 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud. So it's not quite the same.

I think PG doesn't have most of the features I named, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have integrated queues for example (SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED isn't an MQ system), but also, bear in mind the "postgres" cloud vendors sell is often not actually Postgres. They've forked it and are exploiting the weak trademark protection, so people can end up more locked in than they think. In the past one cloud even shipped a transaction isolation bug in something they were calling managed Postgres, that didn't exist upstream! So then you're stuck with both a single DB and a single cloud.

Local dev is the same as other DBs:

    docker run -d --name <oracle-db> container-registry.oracle.com/database/free:latest

See https://container-registry.oracle.com

Works on Intel and ARM. I develop on an ARM Mac without issue. It starts up in a few seconds.

Cost isn't necessarily much lower. At one point I specced out a DB equivalent to what a managed Postgres would cost for OpenAI's reported workload:

> I knocked up an estimate using Azure's pricing calculator and the numbers they provide, assuming 5TB of data (under-estimate) and HA option. Even with a 1 year reservation @40% discount they'd be paying (list price) around $350k/month. For that amount you can rent a dedicated Oracle/ExaData cluster with 192 cores! That's got all kinds of fancy hardware optimizations like a dedicated intra-cluster replication network, RDMA between nodes, predicate pushdown etc. It's going to perform better, and have way more features that would relieve their operational headache.

▲

chrisweekly 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the spirit of helpfulness (not pedantry) FYI "knocked up" means "impregnated". Maybe "put together"?

	▲	mike_hearn 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, this must be a British vs American English thing, thanks for the info. Yes I meant it in this sense: "If you knock something up, you make it or build it very quickly, using whatever materials are available." https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/knock-u...

▲

tracker1 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And, again... most of my issues are with Oracle, Inc. So technical advantages are less of a consideration.

▲ danny_codes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But then you’d have to interact with Oracle.

So.

Yeah no sane person would be that stupid

▲ freedomben 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wanted to hate you for suggesting Oracle, but you defend it well! I had no idea

▲ OtomotO 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you have an option, never ever use Oracle!

Never!