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FridgeSeal

- cost

- only recently runs on Linux

- cost

- all sorts of MSSQL specific features and syntax (@@ is unhinged and you can’t convince me otherwise)

- Postgres docs are better

- Postgres has a massive ecosystem of extensions (see PostGIS alone!)

- did I mention the cost?

- Postgres has wider range language support: basically every language I’ve ever used has a PG library. Not the case for MSSQL. Additionally some of the MSSQL libs are real bad, the Python one is basically like “use this ancient odbc lib lol” it’s great from .net and awful from everywhere else.

- licensing and running costs, because these cannot be overstated.

- features like CDC locked behind _expensive_ licenses, that you get out of the box with Postgres.

Need I say more?

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Need I say more?

Yeah - cost. :)

Cost is the reason I’m moving everything I can off our existing MSSql Servers before our next renewal comes up in a years time.

We did our due diligence and tested all manner of existing expensive queries and whilst there are a handful we just can’t get to run as fast as MSSql Server on Postgres, they only run slightly longer on average (as in 9 or 10 minutes as opposed to 6 or 7) and only at night.

However, given the cost differential ($50k+ vs $0), we can live with this.

Totally unrelated, but is your username at all a reference to the marvellous indie game “The Marvellous Miss Take”?

Sorry if I am nitting here, but cost it’s just a single dimension in a great scheme of things in technology adoption.

I worked with MSSQLServer 05/08/12 in some projects and the whole suite for the time being was one of the best related in terms of easiness to deploy plus due to the integrations with Integration/Analysis services you could deploy cubes and serving that directly on Excel and if you had some people creative in VBA you could reach a very sophisticated and effective way to provide reports.

I am huge fan of PostgreSQL, but back in 2005/2012 in all organisations that I worked would be very hard to justify 3+ extra FTE because someone was idealistically about Open Source a land costs.

> cost it’s just a single dimension

It's a very complicated dimension, especially with databases from vendors that make you go through complicated licensing schemes and audits.

We do not necessarily disagree here.

One thing that we need to take into consideration is back in 2005/2012 the ecosystem around the tooling/frameworks and RDBMS was quite fragmented and whether we like it or not, the non-tech industries had their procurements based on corporate vendors.

I was not a decision-maker at that time, but from what I saw, selling Open Source technologies with the addition of FTEs(OPEX) instead of relying on corporate vendors certified by the auditors and having those costs as CAPEX was a very tough sell. On top of that: several folks making hiring decisions back in time, found that it was way simpler to recruit people to work on SQLServer in a less plug&play stack integrated instead of doing a Jenga stack with several technologies that did not talk to each other and inject FTEs on.

Today the Open Source technologies are way more mature (I dare to say largely better) than those of corporate vendors.

I guess that line of thinking continues. Lots of companies don't run their own PostgreSQL, they let Google/Amazon/Microsoft manage it for them.

Got it. Appreciate that. That makes sense.

Was genuinely curious.

On the cost front do you still need a cal[0] for every user/device?

[0]https://www.trustedtechteam.com/collections/microsoft-sql-se...

From https://www.trustedtechteam.com/collections/microsoft-sql-se...

> CALs offer businesses the flexibility to scale their client access as needed, accommodating a varying number of users or devices accessing SQL Server.

The gall required to write that sentence is astonishing.

Buried one of the most important reasons—FLOSS.

Postgres and their org respects you, unlike MSFT.

It is cost, but it is not as simple as just cost, the ability to just spin up a new database server without the hassle and delay of dealing with getting it licensed it is extremely valuable. This is a large part of the value proposition of linux as well.

I mean, I am sure there are companies with site licenses and it is easy to stand up a new microsoft stack, but I have never worked at any of them, for us it was always fighting with management and the purchasing department to get the licenses we needed. As none of us were really people persons this is exhausting. It was so much easier to stand up a service on linux in comparison. No bureaucracy, no delays just get it and go. So we pushed very hard into the linux and friends stack.

since when do you have CDC out of the box with PG though?

I mean I'm a big fan of the tech but this seems like a stretch

this comment seems unrelated to the comment you're replying to - they didn't say it included CDC, they said that if you want it on MS SQL it will cost lots of money.

no, parent clearly talks about CDC as a feature you get "out of the box"

it's not the case I think

Depends on what your definition of 'CDC out of the box' is.

As a 'side effect' of replication, PostgreSQL supports subscribing on change data. What you do with those changes is up to you. There are tools that make it easy to propagate those changes to message queues or other databases.

As per my other comment, Debezium (as an example) will use Postgres’ replication slots to get CDC messages.

but that's not out of the box if you need Debezium, that's my point

I totally agree that postgresql offers the foundational bricks that allow easy CDC though

What functionality would be needed to have 'CDC out of the box'? The whole point of CDC would be to stream changes to other systems what, by definition, requires 'other systems'.

the functionality offered by Debezium

CDC tools like Debezium hook into Postgres’ replication slots and you get the same CDC info. It’s not a dedicated bit of “feature” like it is in MSSQL, but the same functionality is there.

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