Major North American Automobile Manufacturer Leaves Oracle in the Dust with Postgres and EDB

Challenge

Businesses across industries are looking to take full advantage of the cloud with cloud-first strategies and cloud native database technologies. Unfortunately, many commercial database providers limit enterprises’ options, waylaying them with restrictive licenses, ever-growing costs and frustrating boundaries around what solutions they can and cannot integrate.

For this major North American automobile manufacturer, this was exactly the case. “Back in 2021, we knew we wanted to move to the cloud,” explained their Senior Manager of Data Platforms. “But that just wasn’t feasible with Oracle and SQLServer.”

If this industry leader was truly determined to harness the transformative power of cloud solutions, they would need to find a different, more flexible database solution.

“As we were looking for something that could suit all of our needs, we realized we had applications we could migrate to the cloud, and applications we couldn’t. So, we wanted to find a database solution that could support both,” the Senior Manager emphasized.

Luckily, they did—and without the suffocating limits of legacy database providers.

Solution

The manufacturer researched a range of options and quickly settled upon Postgres, which seemed ideal for their purposes. Not only did it offer freedom from the vendor lock-in and rising prices that drove them away from legacy systems in the first place, but it also provided both open source and commercial options.

“We knew almost immediately that Postgres would be our path going forward,” he said. “It was a very clear solution to the concerns we had been having before. Plus, it was known as low cost, low maintenance—a great combination.”

Since many of their applications were designed for commercial databases, the company opted to deploy a commercial version of Postgres. But whatever vendor they went with, they needed to be sure they would be supported every step of the way.

EDB provides enterprise-grade database mileage

“We knew we needed a few things to make Postgres work for us,” related the Senior Manager. “First, we needed a commercial version of Postgres. Second, we needed robust support for our new database. Finally, we absolutely needed Oracle compatibility. Otherwise, moving all of our most important applications would be unfeasible—just a nightmare.” He paused. “And EDB provided all three.”

As he told us, all of the other vendors they considered could only promise 60% or 70% maximum compatibility with Oracle. When comparing that to EDB’s 90%, the choice was a simple one. After all, if the purpose of leaving Oracle was to ensure the success of their applications, adopting a Postgres database that didn’t support them would make the whole process futile.

Results

Since working with EDB, the manufacturer hasn’t been disappointed—especially with the depth and responsiveness of EDB’s Technical Account Management and Support solutions.

“We have someone who always responds, whether we have questions or are experiencing technical issues. They’re always helping us,” said the Senior Manager.

Professional Services also proved invaluable, setting up backup and recovery and helping guide the enterprise as they settled into and built upon their new architecture.

This support has also made the organization more confident to continue down the cloud path that initially spurred their journey away from Oracle. “We’re currently strategizing for the cloud with EDB’s offering BigAnimal,” he said.

Future

The manufacturer looks to continue to learn more about Postgres and its full suite of capabilities, backed by EDB. “We’re finding new avenues for optimization and tuning, which has been very helpful as we do more and more.” the Senior Manager explained.

As far as he is concerned, the sky's the limit. Now confident enough to design their own environments, the company is excited to discover the full potential of Postgres, day by day.

“EDB has never turned down a call from us. It’s why we know we can do whatever we want to do with Postgres.

If you want to learn more about the full power of Postgres support from EDB, check out our white paper on what a difference enterprise-grade support can make!

Do you have an EDB Postgres success story you want to share? Get in touch with us via our website or at success-stories@enterprisedb.com