The Oil and Gas Dilemma: Finding Alternative Database Management Systems
As you know, at the beginning of this year, the American corporation Oracle, in accordance with the requirements of the US government to tighten sanctions against Russian oil and gas companies, changed the conditions for providing them with its products and services. A ban has been introduced on both new transactions and the extension of existing contracts. These restrictions directly affect many oil and gas companies, including Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil, and Surgutneftegaz. Under the sanctions were 283 Russian companies.
In particular, Oracle imposes a ban on the provision, export or re-export of goods, services and technologies that support projects that are subject to US sanctions. Among such projects are deep-water exploration and production on the Arctic shelf of the Russian Federation. In addition, restrictions apply to shale projects.
This is a sensitive measure, because the leading in the world market Oracle DBMSs are used in more than a quarter of domestic state-owned companies, while the share of Russian products such software from Diasoft, PostgreSQL from Postgres Professional or domestic DBMS Linter of Relex and Red database ”of Red Soft, does not exceed 3%.
Oracle Corporation leads the global DBMS market. According to experts, Oracle now occupies up to 70% of the Russian DBMS market.
According to the Russian Union of Software and Information Technology Developers (SRPO) Fuel and Energy Complex, the dependence on foreign software products in the oil and gas production segment is 90-95%, in oil refining - 98%, and in the transportation of hydrocarbons - 80-85%.
Industry sanctions can cause serious damage. In addition, many years of foreign development in the field of databases form the basis of the technological stack of its enterprises - a whole range of business applications and enterprise-level systems. Import substitution of this framework is a very lengthy, if at all possible, process.
Technologically, the migration of existing applications from Oracle to Russian DBMSs built on open source software is an extremely difficult task. Therefore, companies continue to use their well-functioning DBMS Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. In addition, Russian projects lack many of the key technologies that are offered by licensed software developers.
Can I replace Oracle DBMS?
Everyone who is a little in the subject knows the answer. After all, Oracle is not only the best DBMS in the world, it is a whole ecosystem of data storage and processing. On the other hand, at the level at which many domestic companies use the capabilities of the high-tech Oracle product, instead of American software, domestic software, open source products or development products from the East will be able to cope with the tasks. For a number of tasks, Oracle is not needed, and there is no need to pay for expensive licenses.
Realizing this, competitors have intensified. DBMS and business application developers from Russia and Asia, under US sanctions, expect to occupy part of the niche of American vendors.
Some system integrators have relied on PostgresSQL. For example, Lanita already has solutions that work both on PostgresSQL and Oracle. Business representatives are investing in Postgres Professional, created by the team of PostgreSQL, the leading developers in Russia (Major Contributor). The Ministry of Communications (now the Ministry of Digital Development) is also showing interest in the open PostgreSQL DBMS as an alternative to Oracle: PostgreSQL is considered the most important tool in the import substitution policy. PostgresSQL is positioned as a DBMS close to Oracle, aimed at reliability and integrity of data storage.
PostgreSQL DBMS is used as the main DBMS in the largest Russian projects, such as Avito, processing up to 6000 transactions per second, and Yandex uses PostgreSQL in one of its services, processing more than 500 million transactions per day.
Another option is the Tibero DBMS from the South Korean company TmasSoft, which entered the market in 2003. In the short term, this company claims to be 10% of the global database market. Interestingly, Tibero was originally developed as an alternative to Oracle DBMS and is as compatible with it as possible. Moreover, TmaxSoft offers customers the migration of their own applications to the Tibero DBMS or the development of new products for Tibero. It is also possible to create certified versions of software by Russian developers on Tibero.
Recently, TmaxSoft has offered a year of free use of eight processor licenses for the Tibero Enterprise Edition DBMS, technical support services for a year and a free Partition option that allows you to segment data arrays to speed up querying tables.
The product is already known in Russia. This DBMS is used in the National Payment Card System, the payment card operator Mir. Her testing was conducted and is being conducted by several other large customers in the Russian Federation.
Currently, the total amount of data processed by Tibero at one of the Russian customers is more than 200 TB. Tibero runs highly critical systems that require ongoing availability. It uses internal data replication technologies, partitioning tables, fault tolerance and high availability technologies such as Standby.
TmaxSoft implements a strategy in Russia to enter certain vertical markets with focal partners. So, with R-Style Softlab, it works on the integration of remote banking systems and the RS Bank application with Tibero, collaborates with BPC Banking Technologies, a developer of SmartVista payment processing system. Aiteco has become its specialized technology partner for the OpenFrame system, which allows you to transfer applications from the mainframe environment to open systems. A number of projects are being implemented by Jet Infosystems and Krikunov & Partners Business Systems (KPSS).
Comparing Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Tibero
It is unlikely that “oranges with apples” will be correctly compared, but we will try to compare some features of the well-known relational DBMSs.
Price and Risk
And a few more touches to the Korean product. In Tibero, you only pay for the virtualized piece of equipment you use. Considering licensing, options and support, Oracle is several times more expensive than Tibero. According to user reviews, Tibero is a very “smart” product, it works comparable to Oracle in terms of compilation and query processing speed.
It is worth noting that the capital and operating costs of licensed DBMSs are high today, because one vendor is actually a monopolist. Many IT executives would like to reduce data management costs and are increasingly thinking about it. However, they hold back the possible risks associated with the transition to alternative DBMSs.
How to minimize possible migration risks? Automated tools allow you to determine the degree of compatibility of existing applications with the Tibero DBMS. Special techniques help to make a decision: whether such a transition makes sense or migration for one reason or another is not advisable. TmaxSoft hopes that greater confidence in the success of migration and the desire to streamline budgets will spur the process. However, switching from Oracle to PostgreSQL is also a regular task. To do this, there is special software to minimize costs.
Now there is also an active development of the open source software market, including DBMS, alternative data processing and storage technologies. The growth of the cloud database segment is accelerating - the same Oracle is moving in this direction. TmaxSoft plans to introduce its IaaS and PaaS services for private and public clouds this year. They should complement the affordable licensed DBMS and enterprise-class middleware technologies.
Currently, the Tibero Enterprise Edition DBMS offers a number of options for free, but the popularity of Tibero is restrained by the still evolving ecosystem of supported applications. Meanwhile, TmaxSoft solutions may well occupy those niches where the use of Oracle software is redundant, and the use of open source software is insufficient or unsafe. And PostgreSQL DBMS developers are even sure that it has everything necessary to become the main DBMS used in state and commercial developments with minimal state support.
This means the diversification of the DBMS market. Customers get an alternative when the costs of the DBMS become too high, or because of sanctions they have to look for other options - commercial or STR. Much depends on the criteria for choosing a database, such as performance, security, scalability, support, working with big data and cost of ownership.