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

“Customers are fed up with this continuous spending of money on maintenance costs,” said Young Il ‘Charlie’ Cho (pictured right), sales manager for high availability clusters at DAONECNS Co. Ltd. “And there is no discount; there is no negotiation.

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

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

Less critical databases don’t need high availability

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

In other words, if you don’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 to a precious metal grade analogy: “The lowest and least critical bronze level databases do not require RAC”, did he declare.

Silver Levels: Departmental level utility databases do not need this either. In fact, the only one that really needs to exhibit extreme uptime is at the gold level: “brand impact and revenue-producing databases,” he added.

Modernization engine

Stalwart IBM now offers an EDB Postgres solution. IBM’s Villalobos believes this is as much a requirement for business modernization as anything else driving demand for the cloud-centric open source product. He believes customers should use IBM’s Rocket Cloud (a methodology that helps customers evaluate all database modernization options).

“Not all customers fully understand where they are today,” he said. The analysis of the costs that could be released is part of IBM’s offerings.

Part of what’s driving the move to EDB and PostgreSQL is that Postgres has done a good job of making EDB work for businesses, according to Villalobos.

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

The tangible difference, Sheikh says, is making environments run faster, with “less agility latency,” and the ability to deploy anywhere being attractive to the data scientist.

“Are your developers eager to start a new instance of Oracle every time you start a new project?” Probably not; [they] reach their Postgres, right? Said Villalobos.

However, it is as much the cost that raises awareness of alternatives, such as EDB, as well as implementation tools such as Postgres.

“A lot of customers who are fed up with Oracle and have to bear the enormous cost of maintenance, they want to get away from this financial stress,” Young concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE