[metadata]

Postgres is a better choice for 99% of the companies out there. But there are cases where you need ability to massively scale AND control your database cluster perfectly.

Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints (yes, there is an extension for that) so your optimized query can at some point just 10x in execution time and increase load in production when the plan changes.

In Oracle, I am told you can prioritize certain queries at certain time of day - it's crazy what it can do. Yes, it's slow and expensive. If you have money to throw at the problem, it's fast and it solves your problem, whatever the scale. Their Exadata cluster, for example, is wicked fast storage layer pre-filtering the data it sends to the database.

Of course, I despise their business practices - especially the abuse of customers via audits. As a database, it absolutely has its place regardless of lobbying, corruption, and whatever else they are doing.

[akoboldfrying]

> Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints

Finally, an actual technical argument. I agree that PostgreSQL's absolute insistence on trusting the query optimiser to Do The Right Thing is weird and annoying (despite being sound general strategy). It even seems to contradict its own general spirit of being on the whole extremely customisable -- you can make your own data types, operators, indexing data structures, complete scripting language plugins... but not, ya know, a way to 100% guarantee that this here query will use this here execution plan.