> Oracle and Teradata for example are proven databases with official support available worldwide and a talent pool you can draw from almost immediately.

I've watched Oracle try to strangle more than one company once they were dependent on their database. One they succeeded, one managed to migrate to PostgreSQL just in time. If you build your business to be dependent on Oracle they have you by the balls; don't think they're not going to squeeze. And IME the worldwide talent pool is much more available and... well, talented, for PostgreSQL or MySQL or any of the major open-source options.

If no one allowed small-startup technology into production, then the industry stagnation would be tremendous, so I disagree that is the issue. However, once you do rely on a small-startup database, it better be closed source, so I disagree: the issue is the closed-source part, not the small-startup part.

The fact is that the world depends on closed source databases. So yes I continue to disagree that you should never use one just because it is closed source.

And I never said that people shouldn't use small startup technologies. Only that when you do you take the risk of the company not being around in a few years. And the people who will take that risk are really other startups or early adopters.

>> I disagree: the issue is the closed-source part, not the small-startup part.

Correct. But you are betting the success of your nascent start up on another nascent start up. This is straight up wrong.

For a large company its different. They have all the resources to go into months long migration projects. As a start up, you can't afford time for migrations when you are busy doing the real work.

This is why the world needs early adopters. There needs to be people interested enough in new technologies for their own sake to invest time in them. That's a very different motivation than P&G or Unilever.

Exactly. There is room in this world for closed and open source products.

Enterprise companies will trade technology for stability and supportability. Most of us will flip the other way.

I oversimplify it by saying "Companies will pay cash and accept closed source in return for good documentation and someone to answer the phone." Most non-IT buyers don't bring up open vs closed source in purchasing discussions.

please don't down vote because you disagree. Write a reply. Down vote what is inappropriate and doesn't add to the conversation.

I strongly disagree your stance on Oracle in particular. I had two arrays at a medium size academic library 8 years ago. Anything I had to call about the data base meant a line item for business review due to cost if it wasn't covered by Oracle's service agreement.

PostgreSQL is amazing and I much rather work with that and hire whoever I want with what I want to do either per instance or annual contracts.

It's funny you mention that.. but actually hiring a part-time PostgreSQL DBA is all but impossible, I reached out to most of the support companies listed on the north american website... mainly I wanted for someone to setup a small (3-node) replica set of the most recent version of postgres with plv8 some sane backup scripts and pretty much nobody replied... EnterpriseDB won't talk to you without laying out at least $10k to start, and I would rather pay a person (or small company) I can call that to get things running... more if it kept running well.

I didn't have the time to delve through all the options out there for this purpose, and evaluate each of them, when there are out of the box solutions that were closer to my needs, though not strictly SQL based (Mongo, Rethink, ElasticSearch, Cassandra all come to mind). There is ~6k/month allocated to hosting costs, and ~$40k/month to the handful of people in the IT team... there isn't much wiggle room there for a small company, and everyone wears a couple of hats. The current application is using MS-SQL (hosted in Azure without redundancy) and MongoDB mirrored data for searching against... licensing to get a replicated MS-SQL setup for better availability would be more than our entire next generation hosting budget... If we could have actually talked to someone who wasn't a sales person at EnterpriseDB that could do more than send you a PDF sheet targetted at managers that might have swayed me.

Sorry, will end my mini rant.. in the end, what support I do have from MongoDB (using their backup service), and my experience with actually just using ElasticSearch and Cassandra has been far better for setting up for something resembling high availability/distributed configuration has been easier than even getting a proof of concept PostgreSQL setup working.

I really hope that PostgreSQL gets it together within the next year or so, it would have been my first choice had I been able to actually get some support within a reasonable budget for my needs, or if I actually had the equivalent of a DBAs salary or more to throw at the problem, which I didn't/don't.

This is part of the horrible brokenness of IT labor.

I don't know the features of PostgreSQL that you want to use, but I'm totally willing to learn if somebody is going to cover my living costs. But I'm not even going to respond to your job ad if you put "PostgreSQL plv8 REQUIRED" in it.

For that matter, if you think it's simple enough for a part-time DBA, then why don't you just assign one of your existing IT people to learning and implementing the RDBMS that you need? Surely not all of them want to do the exact same job forever. PostgreSQL has excellent documentation.

Because our resources (time) is already pretty thin wrt maintenance as well as our next generation version. PostgreSQL has several unsupported, and a commercial option for replication. Unfortunately you need a support contract to even talk about getting the commercial/supported version, and there's ongoing development towards bringing it in the box. I already expended enough time trying to get up to speed and have something reasonable working, and it was less time to look elsewhere for the features I needed in another database that had redundancy/scale features in the box.

If I was hiring a full time DBA, I would have put POSTGRESQL DBA as the job title, and made plv8 a feature requirement that I needed/wanted. As it is, there's no budget for that.

This is probably why a lot of companies like to use closed source solutions. I have mainly been using SQL Server and there is a lot of consultants who knows how it works. In a few years I think there will be more database products with good support from 3rd parties but currently it is hard to know what to choose.

The problem is, downvotes due to disagreement are codified as acceptable.

Which still sucks, since downvotes can lead to shadowbans.

PS. Just double checked the Guidelines, and this codification is no longer there. However, there's also no guidance to suggest an appropriate reason to downvote.

Where do you spend it, out of interest? What comparable places are there for chatting on nerdish things like this?

I was hoping for lobste.rs would be the place but it is invite only so the audience is very small in comparison.

I believe I have a few invites.

If you see this: How can one get an invite without posting a mail address in public forums?

Reddit. esp certain subs. its not perfect, and its hard to find the same density of tech-smart folks as HN. however, its more relaxed and friendly, doesn't punish creativity, and doesn't have the same "that opinion or statement is not allowed here" effect as I see on HN. It does have a kind of liberal/PC groupthink on some issues. But they're issues I don't like to talk about anyway. Reddit's discussion forum UI is also much friendlier and more sophisticated than HN's. And they have lots of areas that focus on non-HN topics, while also being better at allowing one to avoid politics and "startup Foo raised/valued-at $X" posts, yet-another-framework posts, etc. Again, you lose some compared to HN, but also gain a lot. Luckily everything on the web is a tab away and we can vote with our eyeballs.