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The beauty of course being that the mere existence of such a clause tells you more than enough about the performance characteristics.

Now, I'm not going to discount Oracle entirely. From what I've learned from some truly hardcore DBAs, there are certain workloads and scenarios where Oracle is still unbeatable.[ß] But outside those special cases, postgres is the rational, correct choice.

ß: For example, if you have insane performance requirements on a single system, I have been explained that oracle can be used with their own "fs" layer, which in turn runs directly on top of block device layer. Essentially, a bare-bones file system designed for nothing but their own DB usage.




I'll play devil's advocate: it's easy to benchmark, but it's hard to demonstrate that the outcome is significant, accurate, or even meaningful. And for whatever reason[0], misinformation tends to be stickier than truths. If I were Oracle, I'd get tired of dispelling bad benchmarks real fast, so much so that I'd go as far as prohibiting publishing benchmarks in the ToS, just to avoid dealing with it.

For example, APFS vs. HFS+ (filesystems are a kind of hierarchical database, so it's not that big a stretch). Multiple secondary sources, citing the the same outdated benchmark from months ago, declare that APFS is slower than HFS+. Here's one from HN[1], with some back & forth arguments and further ad-hoc measurements. Yet nobody bothered running or even mentioned fio.

Or the "ZFS will eat your data if you don't use ECC memory" meme that refuse to die.

[0] Maybe it's because in order to refute "X is bad is wrong", it's hard to not state "X is bad" first, and biased / less astute audiences tend to stop paying attention after absorbing "X is bad"[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384774

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJD1Iwy5lUY&t=46s




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