Oracle was a really solid choice 30 years ago, when 1Tb was an unheard-of database size. Back then, its query optimizer and a couple of strategic hints could make a huge difference in the runtime so that a report could be produced in minutes instead of hours.

These days? You can buy a server with 1Tb of RAM, for the price of one Oracle license. Any Open Source database will work just as well as Oracle on these kinds of datasets.

And if you have bigger datasets, then they are likely not that suitable for RDBMS anyway.

i agree that oracle was a solid choice 30 years ago, though they were already notorious for taking advantage of their customers

also postgres's query optimizer has gotten a lot better

i wouldn't say any open source database. it depends on your index. there are recondite but not unreasonable queries for which mariadb and sqlite still produce pathologically poor query plans which won't complete in a reasonable time even with all the data in ram. and a few years ago i had postgres totally fall over on important queries because we'd forgotten to add an index, and it took us days to figure it out because we were using amazon's outsourced postgres thing and didn't know how to admin it

Yeah, OK. That was a bit of exaggeration for sure :)

SQLite might be a bit under-powered as well for these kinds of jobs.

usually sqlite is several times faster than postgres or oracle unless you have a high update rate, but there are cases where it just fails

For oracle DB, it’s mostly Postgres I guess?

postgres is adequately efficient technology from last millennium, but at the level of execution efficiency it's pretty much the same as oracle, maybe a bit worse

more recent systems like impala, spark, kafka, cassandra, leveldb, influxdb, rocksdb, duckdb, monetdb, lmdb, sqlite, parquet, hbase, etc., are a lot more efficient at execution efficiency, though in many cases that's only 'up to such-and-such a scale' or 'above such-and-such a scale' or 'for such-and-such use cases'. there's a perhaps too comprehensive overview of the scene at https://github.com/newTendermint/awesome-bigdata

but the big business inefficiency with oracle is not technical, it's the human problem of not having control over your core business processes or the ability to continue carrying them out if, when oracle says 'jump', you say anything but 'how high?'

Disregarding your list of "modern technologies" for a second, I think we agree on the core point here: Postgres may or may not be better than oracle DB. The sizeable advantage it has: you're not dependent on another company that will try to extract your margin as a fee.

i agree with your summary