Lots of good people work at Oracle, and I am sure you're one of them.
HOWEVER. There is no world where lifetime costs of using Postgres for any successful company anywhere in the world are greater than using Postgres. I understand that's a key message for your sales team to get out, but only one of the CEOs at Oracle and Percona has flown a fighter jet underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Oracle licensing is famously, famously sticky. Extremely. Incredibly. It's how the company was built and is maintained.
I've never talked to database sales people and have no idea what messages they have or care about. Actually I'm 99% sure they don't care about the HN/startup crowd at all - did you see anyone except me talk about this stuff here? Me neither. I'm making this argument basically because I like making arguments early that are surprising but correct, and databases feel like fertile ground for such arguments. There's a lot of groupthink in this space. And you know all about my history with surprising technology arguments, Peter ;)
Anyway I'd be interested to see a spreadsheet with a worked set of scenarios for both cost and "stickiness" however it's defined (genuinely). I think it's going to depend heavily on:
a) Whether you cloud host or not. The cost of a small Postgres that you run yourself is pretty much whatever your own time is valued at, as self-hosted hardware is cheap. The costs of a Postgres you outsource can be really un-intuitively high. I already showed that a cloud hosted elastic Oracle DB can be cheaper for the same-spec AWS-managed Postgres despite a massive feature disparity on one side. Costs here aren't dominated by hardware nor software purchase costs.
b) What features and scaling level you need, combined with cost of labour in your area. If you want to scale up a Postgres based operation very fast then that's going to take a ton of skilled engineering effort, devs will be slowed down a lot as they spend time on implementing custom sharding schemes etc. At some point the cost of rolling your own ad-hoc solutions to these things will cross with the cost of just buying a system that already solves them all out of the box. Where that cross-point is will depend on all kinds of things like opportunity cost, cost of hiring, cost of developer productivity....
b) Whether you consider unique features to be "stickiness". You're claiming the licensing is sticky here but companies negotiate all kinds of licenses so what does that mean? By default it's charged per core like any other commercial db (or in the cloud by core seconds/storage). If unique features are the problem then that's an aspect of choosing any tech platform. If you're taking advantage of full SQL joins on a 50-node horizontally scaled multi-master cluster then yeah, trying to migrate to something else is going to be sticky because there aren't many other products that offer that. That's tech for you. Still, these days I guess it must be less sticky because there are other people selling very scalable SQL-speaking databases like Spanner.
As for Larry Ellison's stunts, that's great but if you're deciding what platform to use on the basis of executive horsepower then you can pick between fighter jets, Jeff Bezo's rockets, Bill Gates' yachts or Larry Page's flying cars. Selling databases seems to go hand in hand with high tech vehicles, which is probably a sign there's some actual value being delivered there, somewhere.
I referenced Larry as a proxy for his extreme wealth. Although it is true he’s one of the great businessmen of the late 20th century. Just not the sort you want to be in a business deal with in general.
Oracle has always been good at both adding helpful functions that developers rely on, making switching difficult, and also at teasing companies into using more licenses than they’ve purchased, then smacking them with audits and fees as a stick, and a ‘cheaper’ larger license as a carrot to avoid the audit fees.
In the 90s, this was tech like PL/SQL and Materialized views - I’m long out of the Oracle game, so I have no idea where they compete on features now vis-a-vis open source — but I will say that I have owned companies where the Oracle license was both HATED — and outlived all original owners of the company. It’s hard to replace once it’s in your workflow, and that is 100% by design.
I guess audits are fading away as more people move to the cloud. Audits are used by other enterprise tech sellers as well because you don't want DRM or telemetry in something like a mission critical HA DB that runs behind a firewall. So audits it is. Cloud solves all that (admittedly, whilst trading off against data privacy).
HOWEVER. There is no world where lifetime costs of using Postgres for any successful company anywhere in the world are greater than using Postgres. I understand that's a key message for your sales team to get out, but only one of the CEOs at Oracle and Percona has flown a fighter jet underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Oracle licensing is famously, famously sticky. Extremely. Incredibly. It's how the company was built and is maintained.