Yesterday one of the major Russian business newspapers ("Vedomosti" -- it's

like Financial Times or WSJ in Russia) published an interesting article

http://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2016/03/17/633926-importnii-soft-zamenit

(in Russian, sorry – please use Google Translate).

It says that Oracle Corp. sent a special Postgres-related letter to at

least several big Russian IT companies. In the letter Oracle is suggesting

the ways to protect Oracle DBMS from migration to Postgres in government

organizations and big Russian companies where many years Oracle was the

default DBMS choice.

Now, in 2016, such migration in many cases is very probable (and some

companies already did it or started to do), since government itself wants

to depend less on specific foreign vendors and considers Postgres as good

OSS DBMS alternative supported by local developers.

The first page of that letter:

https://gist.github.com/NikolayS/1bbc624dfc088be6f15c

– so it really looks like Oracle Corp. claims that Postgres is worse than

Oracle in literally everything: performance, reliability, security,

manageability, scalability, etc. Even (sic!) the Total Cost of Ownership is

among the properties they are referring to.

I think that this doc proves that Oracle knows pretty well were their

Oracle partners/distributors interests lie (simply saying "bigger the price

– better revenue for both") and sending it Oracle tries to help

distributors to protect their mutual $-related interest showing how to

behave. The thing is that doc in many its claims is wrong. But in many

cases in will work and final customer will receive solution that was chosen

not on his best interest ("quality/cost") but rather on the interest of

Oracle and its distributors.

I've got that doc now – see the PDF attached (again in Russian, please use

Google Translate).

It's poorly written in terms of Russian grammar, and contains factual

mistakes (e.g. the claim about lack of XML/JSON in Postgres), but

nevertheless is official comparison from Oracle and underlines many

Oracle's strong features.

Is it worth to react somehow on this?

If yes – anyone interested in creation of similar document which will prove

that Postgres in many cases *is* a good substitution? I'd translate it and

publish in Russian, and spread among journalists.

