
Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf] - postila
https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05.19%20Yandex.Mail%20success%20story.pdf
======
coolspot
My take aways:

* Reasons to migrate were: unresponsive support, inconvenient deployment, closed source, huge cost.

* It took just 10 man-years to rewrite whole project from Oracle to Postgres (e.g. 10 developers, 1 year), which is amazing.

* They benefited from Postgres data versioning, arrays and composite types.

* They liked writing logic on PL/pgSQL more than on Oracle PL/SQL: reduced code size, increased test coverage.

* Easier deployment of changes due no library cache locks.

Great thing for community is that Yandex now commited to Postgres, meaning it
will get more testing and bug-fixes faster.

~~~
anarazel
> Great thing for community is that Yandex now commited to Postgres, meaning
> it will get more testing and bug-fixes faster.

That remains to be seen. There's a fair amount of huge postgres users that
don't even bother to report bugs they find...

~~~
postila
But you're right – a lot of such companies exist unfortunately.

If Uber DBAs came to IRC or any public place (see
[http://Postgres.chat](http://Postgres.chat)) where Postgres experts are
present and didn't hesitate asking questions, they would still be running
Postgres.

------
zuron7
Yandex.Mail provides custom domain E-Mails for free, the only large company to
do so and not to mention how good it is.

~~~
xienze
Russian email hosting. What could go wrong?

~~~
LeonM
American email hosting, what could go wrong?

~~~
the_common_man
Yeah, I always find it amusing when people find russia and china on a lower
moral/ethical ground when everything on american soil is equally watched and
processed. if not by nsa, it's for ads.

~~~
rjeli
Please take a look at the Human Rights Watch reports[0] for USA, China and
Russia. I honestly wonder how you can reach such a conclusion about freedom of
expression and human rights in those countries.

[0] [https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016](https://www.hrw.org/world-
report/2016)

~~~
mafribe
Human Rights Watch being an American organisation, led by a member of the US
power elite (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Soros' OSF) might have something to do with
it?

Nah, perish the though!

~~~
fulafel
HRW funding and staff indeed looks surprisingly US-biased. But Amnesty and PEN
also score the US a couple notches above Russia and China.

------
elmigranto
Overview
[https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/track/DBA/923.en.html](https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/track/DBA/923.en.html)

Video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SS4R1sFH3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SS4R1sFH3c)

------
niftich
So having read through the slides, these are not bad slides, but I'm missing
the 'real' wow-factor of why Postgres was a better choice in the end than
Oracle. There's no doubt that the rewrite (which, because of PL/SQL ->
PL/pgSQL, there was a rewrite) benefited them, but all I can glean from the
slides is Postgres hasn't failed them yet and the rewrite worked.

So as much as I want to talk about Oracle vs. Postgres, these slides aren't
giving me anything technical to debate.

~~~
postila
1\. Price if obvious reason of migration, and in their case (multiple
datacenters and "-1 datacenter" policy) it was huge benefit.

2\. The other concern was Oracle's slow bugfixing and reaction to feedback.

So, this is a good case showing how a company can stop wasting millions of $
for proprietary software, joining Open Source community, contributing to it
and taking benefits from tech collaboration with core developers of the
product.

~~~
niftich
So, they say 'shop.oracle.com' was their 'main reason' for switching but that
reads as a half-joke, half-serious riff on Oracle's famous ability to extract
money from people; the other salient points I can find are:

\- PL/SQL was harder to deploy than PL/pgSQL (as stated later)

\- Only synchronous interface in Oracle's OCCI

\- Problems with Oracle's development environments

\- Not very responsive support from Oracle.

But the dev environment and support for Postgres are not talked about.

Also I can't quite figure out if "3x more hardware" is supposed to be a good
thing on their last slide. It's possible that it's a good thing (if it's, say,
we can replicate to more servers), but to me it doesn't read like one.

~~~
postila
Details were in the talk itself, watch the video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SS4R1sFH3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SS4R1sFH3c).
In particular, they mentioned how Tom Lane fixed a bug they found and did it
just in 38 minutes.

------
trollixx
I am using Yandex for my FOSS project's domain. So far, I haven't encountered
any big issues. The web interface is plain and simple, but occasionally has
some glitches.

Their mobile app (Android) is quite pleasant and lightweight.

What might be a problem for non-Russian speaking people is the lack of
documentation in English. Quite often a random link redirects to a page in
Russian.

------
manigandham
To stay on topic: Does anyone else have stories of moving massive datasets to
postgres from other commercial databases?

We're looking to make the switch from SQL Server when 9.6 comes out (and
proves to be more scalable).

~~~
olavgg
SQL Server performs slightly better than PostgreSQL for analytics. This is
mostly because of parallel queries which will still be more efficient on SQL
Server when PostgreSQL 9.6 is released.

On the other hand, PostgreSQL can take advantage of ZFS compression which is
great for archiving cold data.

~~~
dmpk2k
Minor note: ZFS compression is great for live data too -- lz4 compression has
_very_ low CPU overhead.

~~~
olavgg
Yes and no. It depends on the use case, if you do a lot of updates, you do
want a small recordsize(8kb) and if so, you do not benefit greatly from LZ4.

------
blinkingled
> 3x more hardware # for Postgres

Tells you something about how insanely costly Oracle's licenses are. Whatever
you say about Oracle though - Oracle DB is an incredibly well performing and
reliable piece of software. (Attested by experience - we had several Oracle
DBs running on HP-UX Itanium that only needed to be handled when OS and Oracle
patches were needed. Massively used too - think 36 PA-RISC cores at peak, 24
IA64 ones. It also helps that there are lot of DBAs with great deal of Oracle
experience.)

~~~
d0uble
Nobody argues that Oracle is a very good database. But 3x more hardware and 10
man-years are an order of magnitude cheaper than Oracle licencies cost (even
with maximum discount).

~~~
blinkingled
Yes that's the point I was trying to make. Licenses and support are an ongoing
cost and from what I keep hearing oracle has increased them significantly in
recent years.

------
jorgecastillo
Yandex.Mail is my favorite email provider and I would invite anyone reading
this to give it a try.

~~~
overcast
Please cite examples as to why it's your favorite Email provider.

~~~
jorgecastillo
For starters it's not very crowded on usernames, so I got to use my
'namelastname' as username, also I don't think I've seen any ads so far.
Another aspect of the service I really like, is that it has less magic than
Gmail. I always get email labeled wrong in Gmail. At first I tried to label
them properly and expected Google to get them right over time, now I don't
bother. I would definitely pay for this service if this was an option. To be
fair Russia along with the US, France & Japan is one of my favorite countries,
so I might be very biased.

~~~
oneloop
> Another aspect of the service I really like, is that it has less magic than
> Gmail. I always get email labeled wrong in Gmail. At first I tried to label
> them properly and expected Google to get them right over time, now I don't
> bother.

While I never tried yandex's email, I do share the impression that gmail is
too magical and shouldn't be labelling my emails outside of the explicitly
rules that i have set.

> To be fair Russia along with the US, France & Japan is one of my favorite
> countries, so I might be very biased.

Haha same here! It makes me so sad the propaganda war that russia and the us
are having. Those two countries are similar in so many ways. Russia was
unfortunate that communism had a successful revolution, so they are currently
some 30 years behind culturally :-/

~~~
quirkafleeg
> Russia was unfortunate that communism had a successful revolution, so they
> are currently some 30 years behind culturally :-/

That "unfortunate" revolution took Russia from the feudal age into the nuclear
age in a single generation, so without it they'd presumably be about 100 years
behind the USA.

This may explain why your negative opinion of the USSR/communism is not
necessarily shared by Russians.

The most popular leaders of the 20th century, as voted by Russians, are
Brezhnev, Lenin and Stalin, while the most unpopular are Gorbachev and
Yeltsin, responsible for the collapse and break up of the USSR.

Only a rigged and unfair election prevented the Communist Party leader being
elected president by the people of Russia in 1996, after they had experienced
the joys of several years of capitalism.

In 2016, a quarter of a century after the breakup of the USSR (which happened
against the express wishes of the Soviet people), the Communist Party is still
the second most popular party in Russia, and most Russians (as demonstrated in
repeated polls) would like to see the restoration of the USSR.

As for Yandex, the founder started in business in the USSR, and he is not
Russian.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The most popular leaders of the 20th century, as voted by Russians, are
> Brezhnev, Lenin and Stalin, while the most unpopular are Gorbachev and
> Yeltsin, responsible for the collapse and break up of the USSR.

Brezhnev is more responsible for the collapse of the USSR than either
Gorbachev or Yeltsin (or anyone else, except maybe Yuri Andropov.) Oh, sure,
he was dead and the other two were around when it happened, but it was his
intervention in Afghanistan that essentially sealed the fate of the USSR.

------
leojg
This seems good.

Not related with the migration itself but I tried to use yandex and its
mailing service a couple of years ago when attempting to become google
independent but it didn´t work well with spanish queries so I eventually went
back to google. But I recall that yandex mail was really nice.

------
mbesto
I look at the operations of a lot of middle market tech companies that are
fairly old (10+ years in existence) and I'm starting to see more and more
companies move off of Oracle and on to Postgres. I expect this trend to
continue.

------
dangerboysteve
What version of Postgres did they end up using?

~~~
d0uble
We started our first production systems with 9.3. When we started migration
process and until it ended we used 9.4. Right now all our production clusters
are 9.5.

------
oneloop
Yandex is doing quite some interesting things, I think they don't get enough
love from HN.

~~~
favadi
Never seen any non-russian yandex user myself.

~~~
PeterisP
I don't see any other free providers of custom domain emails; so when a friend
incorporated and wanted to have bob@bobscompany.com then I set him up with
yandex - all "english market" services suddenly wanted a rather unreasonable
business-class pricing for that simple thing.

~~~
SSLy
as someone else mentioned: zoho. I think it's $2.5/month for unlimited domains
connected to one mailbox.

------
Allamaprabhu
I see that document is poorly formatted. Lacks sufficient indentation.

