When comparing Oracle Database vs Postgres, the Slant community recommends Postgres for most people. In the question“What are the best ACID-compliant scalable databases?” Postgres is ranked 1st while Oracle Database is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Postgres is:
Built by passionate developers, available for free, and is well supported by its active community.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro World wide technical support
Oracle is a large company with specialists in a lot of countries. It's very easy to find consultants and any kind of help with Oracle.
Pro Useful features for daily workflow
Some of the most important features are the partitioning option, active data guard, and security options. All of these are very useful for daily workflow.
Pro Stable
Pro Secure
Pro Scalable
Pro Reduced downtime during upgrades
Oracle Database has parallel upgrading for high available applications. Updates are made in parallel without keeping the database down.
Pro High performance parallel quesries
Oracle Database has introduced concurrent execution of union branches, which means that one set of parallel servers will execute one branch, a second set will execute another branch and so on. Instead of the old system where each branch executed one after the other.
Pro Open Source
Built by passionate developers, available for free, and is well supported by its active community.
Pro Supports migration from other major proprietary and open source databases
With the extensive SQL support and migration tools, Postgres users are easily able to migrate their databases over to the Postgres database with little effort.
Pro JSON support
JSON support allows for Postgres to transfer data as raw text and without attributes and markup overhead. This will result in new levels of speed, efficiency and flexibility for developers.
Pro Highly scalable
Continues to work well under low or heavy loads in order to meet the users' need.
Pro Object-Oriented Database
You can reuse existing approved design table and extend its capability by inheritance. You can reuse ancestor method byy declaring new trigger for descendant but reuse ancestor trigger procedure. You can add, remove or override column constraint making it differ from its ancestor. Applying OOP with database design help me reuse, extend, and encapsulate business logic and end up a rapid design, and less errants. PostgreSQL is a powerful RDBMS while its OOP is sufficient for OOP modular design. Especially its Open Source ,and free.
Pro True ACID-compliance
Built in, so users won't have to worry about atomicity, consistency, isolation and the durability of the database.
Pro Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC)
Postgres uses MVCC. For each user connected to the database the Postgres database shows a snapshot of the database at a particular instance. When the database needs to update an item it will add the newer version and mark the old version as obsolete. This allows the database to save overhead but requires a regulated sweep to delete the old, obsolete data.
Pro Multiple Language Interfaces
"There are interfaces for Java (JDBC), ODBC, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, and Qt just to name a few."
Pro Great query planner
Unlike MySQL, you generally don't spend time on hinting the query planner in order to make PostGres perform well.
Pro RETURNING option on INSERT queries
For example:
INSERT INTO table (field_1, field_2, field_3) VALUES (value_1, value_2, value_3) RETURNING id;
Cons
Con Proprietary
Con Terrible company reputation
Oracle is very (in)famous for being involved in a number of controversies. Some of them have ended up in lawsuits with other tech companies because of license disputes. The latest one is a lawsuit against Google for Google's implementation of JAVA in their Android ecosystem.
Con Ghost data
To work around ghost data you can after encrypting something, manually move everything out of the old table space and then shred those data files. To be able to get rid of ghost data automatically would be great.
Con Overkill for simple setups
If a database will be doing many simple operations Postgres may be over-kill.