Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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