Migration of Oracle to PostgreSQL

Top Triggers

PostgreSQL is Gaining on Oracle

Looking at the future trends, there are strong reasons for IT leaders to believe Oracle’s position is at risk from being disrupted by open source alternatives.

Since its inception in the 90s, PostgreSQL has rapidly matured to become a robust and highly functional open source database with a large and growing community. Due, in significant part, to its ACID-compliance and degree of conformance with the SQL standard, IT leaders and executives are increasingly considering migrating existing Oracle installations to PostgreSQL environments. While the idea is often deemed as having merit, as a strategic decision for an organization, and one that will require significant resources, leaders are rightfully cautious about making the leap from idea to practice.

The question that comes to mind when faced with the uncertainties of a potential Oracle to PostgreSQL migration is “Who can I talk to that has already done this, and what can I learn from their experience?” Indeed, there much to learn from the journey of organizations that have already started or completed such a migration.

The answers to these questions also we must know :

• What drives IT Leaders to decide to migrate from Oracle to PostgreSQL?
• What benefits do IT Leaders expect to gain by migrating?
• What are the top challenges that IT leaders need to plan for as part of migration strategy?
• How long to migrations take in practice, and what business impacts are encountered along the way?

In this post, we will highlight , the users actively considering migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL can use these insights to help guide internal discussions, while those that may have recently completed a migration can incorporate the information into a post mortem to better understand how their experience compares with peers in the industry.

Impetus to action: Motivations for migrating to PostgreSQL

What might cause an IT leader to consider making a change to their critical database infrastructure? We found that there are various drivers and events in an IT leader’s organization that trigger the motivation to pursue an Oracle to PostgreSQL migration

Reacting to Oracle license renewals

Whereas open source database software allows administrators to instantiate and scale deployments without prolonged contract negotiations, commercial vendors are notorious for their licensing complexities. Oracle, in particular, is known for its aggressive use of strict licensing terms and ongoing audits with its customers. Not only does this add operational overheads for IT teams when they need to scale-up server hardware or add deployments, but it also creates an ongoing risk of financial losses due to non-compliance. Many IT leaders would be more than happy to avoid these issues altogether by moving off of Oracle and onto PostgreSQL. With its permissive open source license, PostgreSQL provides a compelling cure to the seemingly never-ending pain of dealing with Oracle license issues.

Transitioning to an open source culture

The benefits of PostgreSQL’s open source license don’t just end at addressing Oracle’s licensing nightmare. Open source software has quickly transformed itself from the domain of researchers and academics to an entire ecosystem of code bases that serve as viable enterprise alternatives to their commercial counterparts. With benefits such as vendor-neutrality and flexibility, enterprises are increasingly taking an “open source first” mentality when weighing potential options in the market. As part of this shift in mindset, IT leaders naturally find themselves viewing database software as just another domain where open source is a better alternative, with PostgreSQL being the leading candidate to replace proprietary Oracle databases.

Supporting modern engineering teams

Cloud computing and DevOps have taken the enterprise by storm over the past decade. Teams today strive to develop efficient and repeatable processes around the ability to instantiate separate environments for development, testing, and production requirements within private or public clouds. Those that successfully achieve this in practice reap the benefits of accelerated software delivery pipelines and improvements in quality and responsiveness to user requests. Commercial software licenses such as those offered by Oracle can insert significant friction when attempting to execute on these strategies, countering the inertia to continue with legacy systems. One of the key drivers to migrate to PostgreSQL is desired to adopt Cloud.

Meeting organizational needs

IT leaders are always striving to address the needs and requirements of their internal stakeholders more effectively. The prevalence of function-specific applications and SaaS tools has helped to increase the velocity and breadth of demands as different business groups pick best-of-breed software for their needs. Two common examples of how these needs get surfaced to IT teams are requests for self-service capabilities and database support for modern applications. The former allows users to rapidly deploy databases on demand without the need to enlist IT resources. As it pertains to the latter, while modern applications will sometimes support Oracle databases, the connectors for open source databases like PostgreSQL are ubiquitous and oftentimes easier to configure.

Success metrics: Defining expected business benefits

IT veterans learn quickly in their careers to predicate initiatives upon sound business cases that align with broader organizational goals and have buy-in from leadership. Particularly when embarking upon projects that carry significant downside risks, it becomes critical to articulate the benefits of an endeavor. These supporting value propositions typically incorporate quantitative financial metrics as well as more general qualitative implications.

Addressing Oracle license costs

Business leaders are increasingly under pressure to evaluate their budgets and streamline spending to improve the financial health of the overall organization. A common first step when analyzing IT spending is to itemize all major recurring license and subscription fees. Migrating to PostgreSQL can allow organizations to remove database licensing costs altogether from their budgets.

The TCO advantage of PostgreSQL over Oracle

The financial overheads of Oracle databases don’t end with licensing costs as these serve as merely one component of the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Support and maintenance costs can quickly accumulate and contribute tangibly towards the TCO. While Oracle provides paid support through its service agreements, it doesn’t stack up favorably against the options available for PostgreSQL. In some cases, the (free) community support may suffice for teams, and they can forego additional expenses altogether. In cases where leaders need to bring in external support, there is a large selection of service providers and consultants with expertise in open source databases such as PostgreSQL. This allows IT teams to find a suitable match that balances costs and desired expertise.

Qualitative benefits of PostgreSQL over Oracle

While TCO numbers provide quantitative metrics to support a business case for migrating to PostgreSQL, there are additional qualitative benefits that can also help drive the argument in its favor, including:

• Strong community
• Ease of use
• Avoiding vendor lock-in
• Deployment flexibility
• Supporting developer innovation

These benefits should be incorporated into the conversation when weighing a potential migration, and many of them have a compounding impact. For example, the combination of ease of use and deployment flexibility can lead to increased developer innovation, which in turn drives greater value within the organization. It’s clear that though these effects may be more difficult to quantify, they can contribute greatly to the overall return on investment from a migration.

While the benefits discussed here may be somewhat intuitive, teams often identify additional unexpected business benefits when migrating to PostgreSQL as they carry out a migration in practice such as the availability of multiple deployment options and an improved ability to attract engineering talent.

Creating an action plan: Setting objectives for a successful migration

Having established the motivation and business case to migrate from Oracle to PostgreSQL, the next step is for IT leaders to create a plan that allows stakeholders to understand the scope of the transition. Three important aspects of any migration plan include:

• Identifying key goals and objectives
• Defining and mitigating any potential business risks
• Creating execution timelines

Identifying key goals and objectives

Being historically established in the business, legacy Oracle databases are highly ingrained within an enterprise. Therefore, as part of planning a migration to PostgreSQL IT teams must answer key questions around what the target outcome should look like including what percentage of the existing Oracle footprint they should migrate. In some cases, there may be a longer runway to test and evaluate migrations allowing IT teams to proceed in a scaled rollout over time. In this scenario, the initial migration target may consist of a smaller percentage of the existing Oracle installation. From our survey, we found that nearly 90% of respondents planned to migrate over a quarter of their Oracle databases to PostgreSQL within a year.

Mitigating risks to the business

No IT initiative is risk-free, and given the critical role databases play in the enterprise, planning for failure scenarios during migrations is especially important. Potential challenges that IT teams can expect to address include:

• Downtime
• Integration risks (data and code)
• Managing gaps in teams’ skill-set

Challenges such as downtime and code migration issues arise during the course of the migration and can impact the business immediately. Others, such as the need to address a gap in internal expertise with PostgreSQL, are likely to present themselves over time if left unaddressed. Assessing the potential for these types of risks and anticipating how to respond when they arise is critical to prepare for an Oracle to PostgreSQL migration effectively. IT leaders should also dedicate time to think through the implications of any potential hidden costs of migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL as they dive into their detailed migration implementation plans, including impacts to database administrators and developers.

Additional challenges can be risk vectors include potential security and compliance issues, day-two PostgreSQL operations, and the ability to find migration tools to help support the process. The top three Oracle to PostgreSQL migration challenges of minimizing downtime, migrating data, and reliability provide IT leaders a strong starting point for developing migration-related risk management strategies.

Setting execution timelines

Migrating systems as complicated as databases isn’t for the faint-hearted and doesn’t happen overnight. When contemplating a migration plan, IT leaders need to determine an appropriate time frame for execution. Generally we found that the majority of teams expected migrations to last anywhere from 7 months to more than a year and a half. Setting an appropriate timeline for a migration initiative ensures all stakeholders have a common expectation to plan around while the IT team proceeds with execution.

Evaluating success: Comparing reality to expectations

Review Business Cases, Planning will help in for an Oracle to PostgreSQL migration.