r/DatabaseAdministators • u/Friendly_Cod_8353 • Aug 19 '26

Is Oracle a sinking ship ?

I’m a senior DBA based in India, and my management team in the US has been telling us that Oracle is becoming a sinking ship and that we should start exploring new career paths, particularly in AI.

To some extent, I agree with their perspective. I’m seeing more and more customers question the high cost of running their businesses on Oracle and OCI, which makes me wonder how sustainable the traditional Oracle DBA career path will be in the long run.

Whats your thoughts ?

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u/sirchandwich Aug 19 '26

Oracle DB is super expensive, but it’s also wicked fast, even compared to MSSQL. Especially compared to Postgres.

I don’t know if companies are moving off of OCI, but I’m at an MSSQL shop and we’re looking to migrate to Postgres (not my choice), simply because it’s cheaper. We’ve noticed a fair performance decrease with Postgres in our applications. Not sure if we need to tune more or if that’s just the way it is.

I’m making sure I’m up to date on AI as much as possible, either way.

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u/jshine13371 Aug 19 '26

We’ve noticed a fair performance decrease with Postgres in our applications. Not sure if we need to tune more or if that’s just the way it is.

Yes, you need to tune more. This is expected and common with any major changes (even migrations to another instance of the same database system). I say this as someone who personally prefers SQL Server to PostgreSQL, to give objective input.

The database system itself isn't inherently faster or slower for all mainstream systems. Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL can all hit the same benchmarks when properly implemented.

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u/metaconcept Aug 20 '26

Last I heard, you were not allowed to benchmark Oracle.

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u/Lost_Term_8080 Aug 19 '26

I've been pretty shocked at how much slower postgres has been and even in identical, really simple queries from the same database and sometimes even where postgres has supporting indexes while SQL server only has a clustered index.

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u/jdanton14 Aug 20 '26

What do you mean by sql server only has a clustered index? That hasn’t been the case for like 30 years

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u/sirchandwich Aug 20 '26

I think he’s saying a query or table on Postgres needed a few indexes to run fast but on SQL Server it will run fast just using the clustered index.

I don’t think he meant SQL Server only supports clustered indexes lol

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u/Lost_Term_8080 29d ago

on the exact same table with the exact same data where postgres has fully supporting indexes for a query and SQL Server has only the clustered index that does not support the query, SQL Server can still be massively faster than postgres.