Open-source databases are a viable alternative to de facto Oracle across swaths of industries, according to a panel of technology executives. EDB coupled with PostgreSQL can support many workloads that enterprise would formerly have run using Oracle, they said.

“Customers got tired of this continuous spending of money for the maintenance costs,” said Young Il ‘Charlie’ Cho (pictured right), high availability cluster sales manager at DAONECNS Co. Ltd. “And there is no discount; there is no negotiation.”

Cho believes that despite the dominance of Oracle in his home market of South Korea, customers “want to move away from the expensive stuff.” That belief, that the EDB Postgres combo is a suitable replacement for Oracle, was echoed by two other executives. The consensus being that not all databases need superlative levels of availability. Cost and modernization also play a role in this shift.

Young, along with Abdul Sheikh (pictured center), chief technology officer of Cintra Software & Services Inc., and Alan Villalobos (pictured left), director of development, database partnerships and user experience at IBM, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Postgres Vision 2021. They discussed the how EDB and Postgres might one day replace Oracle. (* Disclosure below.)

Less critical databases don’t need high availability

“We’re not saying that EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios. But apply the technology where it’s appropriate, where it’s required,” Sheikh said.

In other words, if one doesn’t need Real Application Clusters, Oracle’s high-availability environment, then why not use open source EDB?

Organizations have a three-tier database requirement that Sheikh equates it to a precious-metal grade analogy: “The lowest, less critical bronze level databases don’t require RAC,” he said.

Silver tiers — utility databases that are departmental level also don’t need it. In fact, the only one that really must feature extreme availability is at the gold level: the “revenue producing, brand impact databases,” he added.

Modernization driver

Stalwart IBM is now offering an EDB Postgres solution. IBM’s Villalobos thinks it’s as much an enterprise modernization requirement as anything else that’s driving demand for the open-source, cloud-oriented product. He thinks customers should use IBM’s Rocket cloud (methodology that helps customers appraise all database modernization options).

“Not all customers totally understand where they are today,” he said. Analyzing what costs could be freed-up is a part of what IBM offers.

Part of what is driving the movement toward EDB and PostgreSQL, is that Postgres has done a good job on getting EDB working for enterprise, according to Villalobos.

“Is there any database that can finally replace Oracle in the world,” Young asked. The interoperability and compatibility between Oracle and EDB makes EDB a contender, he believes.

Tangible difference, according to Sheikh, include getting environments running more quickly, with “less latency in terms of agility,” and the ability for deployment anywhere being attractive factors for the data scientist.

“Are your developers pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you’re starting a new project? Probably not; [they] reach for their Postgres, right?” Villalobos stated.

It’s as much cost, though, that’s driving awareness of alternatives, such as EDB, along with the implementation tools like Postgres.

“A lot of customers that are sick of Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance, they want to move away from this cost stress,” Young concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Postgres Vision event. Neither EnterpriseDB Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE