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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

It'd be interesting to see what percentage of companies signed up with Larry stick with Larry out of sheer momentum. Sure, proprietary DBMSes can be faster and more efficient, but I can't imagine they'd be so much more efficient as to justify the license fee, so something else would have to be the justification.

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It's for the support in most cases.

But last time I really used Oracle's RDBMS (10g era) it still had capabilities that no open source database had. If you really needed that, there wasn't an easy substitute. I'm sure Postgres has narrowed the gap by now.

In 2010-2015 when HN and Twitter or all social media at the time thought Postgres would take over the DB world in 10 years time. And yet Postgres 2025 ( ignoring extensions ) is still not competing well with Oracle / MSSQL in 2010-2015. And ignoring politics or preference MySQL is still in many ways better than Postgres.

I am sure some day it would come. But it will likely take another 10 years. I just hope Neki + Oriole could come sooner.

Depends on what circles you are in. If you spend time on HN you see a lot of SQLite and Postgres discussion and building. I can't remember the last time I saw an interesting article here about using MySQL/Oracle/MSSQL. You use those because your CIO told you, like COBOL.

Postgres has mostly taken over the world outside of enterprise.

Enterprise has its own needs largely irrelevant to the rest of us.

> MySQL is still in many ways better than Postgres

Source:

Any one of: the risk of a migration going wrong is too high, application or infrastructure compatibility issues, or the cost of retraining staff who work with the database to work with something else.

It is possible that there are simple solutions to these problems, but the perception that they are serious will turn companies away from a migration.

I think everybody has a horror story about code depending on the empty string and NULL being the same, silly stuff like that can trip up migrations.

The main reason I'd say is that there's no functional benefit to ripping out a database and replacing it, so there's always something more important to do that actually drives revenue.

I'd argue that postgres brings with it substantially lower risks in terms of license compliance/audits/price hikes. Not sure if that can drive a migration, but it should be reason enough to select open source for new projects.

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