Oil and gas dilemma: in search of alternative DBMS

As you know, earlier 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 their products and services. A ban has been introduced both on new deals and on the renewal of existing contracts. These restrictions directly concern many oil and gas structures, including the enterprises of Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil and Surgutneftegaz. 283 Russian companies fell under the sanctions.

In particular, Oracle introduces a ban on the provision, export or re-export of goods, services and technologies that support projects that are related to US sanctions. Among such projects are deep-sea exploration and mining on the Arctic shelf of the Russian Federation. In addition, restrictions apply to shale projects.


This is a sensitive measure, because the leading Oracle DBMS on the world market is 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 from Relaks and Red database "of the Red Soft company, while does not exceed 3%.


Oracle Corporation leads the world DBMS market. According to experts, Oracle now holds up to 70% of the Russian database market.
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According to the Russian Union of Software and Information Technology Developers (SRPO) of the fuel and energy complex, dependence on foreign software products in the oil and gas production segment is 90-95%, in oil refining 98%, and in transportation of hydrocarbons 80-85%.

As a result of industry sanctions can be seriously damaged. In addition, the long-term development of foreign databases in the field form the basis of the technological stack of its enterprises - a whole complex of business applications and enterprise-level systems. Import substitution of this framework is a very long process, if at all possible.

Technologically, the migration of existing applications from Oracle to Russian DBMS, built on open source software, is an extremely difficult task. Therefore, companies continue to use their well-functioning Oracle, IBM and Microsoft DBMS. In addition, Russian projects lack many of the key technologies that are offered by licensed software developers.

Is it possible to 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 product Oracle, instead of American software, domestic software, open source products or development "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.

Understanding this, competitors have stepped up. The developers of the DBMS and business applications from Russia and Asia under the conditions of the sanctions of the USA expect to occupy part of the niche of American vendors.
Some system integrators have bet on PostgresSQL. For example, Lanita already has solutions that work on both PostgresSQL and Oracle. Business representatives are investing in Postgres Professional, created by a team of leading PostgreSQL developers living in Russia (Major Contributor). The Ministry of Communications and Mass Media (now the Ministry of Digital Development) is also showing interest in an open PostgreSQL DBMS as an alternative to Oracle: PostgreSQL is considered to be the most important tool in import substitution policies. PostgresSQL is positioned as a close to Oracle DBMS, aimed at the 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 Tibero DBMS from the South Korean company TmasSoft, which entered the market in 2003. In the near future, this company claims to be 10% of the global database market. Interestingly, Tibero was originally developed as an alternative to Oracle DBMS and is most compatible with it. 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 Russian developers on Tibero.

Recently, TmaxSoft offered a year of free use of eight processor licenses from the Tibero Enterprise Edition DBMS, technical support services for a year, and a free Partition option that allows you to segment data sets to speed up queries to tables.
The product is already known in Russia. This DBMS is used in the National Payment Card System, the World payment card operator. Her testing was conducted and carried out by several more large customers in the Russian Federation.

Currently, the total amount of data processed by Tibero with one of the Russian customers is more than 200 TB. Tibero runs highly critical systems that require continuous availability. Internal data replication technologies, partitioning tables, fault tolerance and high availability technologies such as Standby are used.

TmaxSoft implements in Russia a strategy of entering certain vertical markets with focal partners. So, with the company R-Style Softlab, she is working on the integration of remote banking systems and the RS Bank application with Tibero, collaborating with BPC Banking Technologies, the developer of the payment processing system SmartVista. Ayteko has become its specialized technology partner in the OpenFrame system, which allows you to transfer applications from mainframe environments to open systems. Jet Infosystems and Krikunov and Partners Business Systems (KPBS) are implementing a number of projects.

Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Tibero DBMS Comparison

It is unlikely that it would be correct to compare “oranges with apples”, but we will try to compare some features of the well-known relational DBMS.

Price and risks

And a few more touches to the Korean product. In Tibero, you pay only for the virtualized part of the equipment used. With licensing, options, and support, Oracle costs several times more than Tibero. According to user feedback, Tibero is a very smart product, it works comparable to Oracle in terms of compilation and query processing speed.

It is worth noting that capital and operating costs for licensed DBMS are high today, because one vendor is in fact a monopolist. Many IT executives would like to reduce the cost of data management and are increasingly thinking about it. However, they restrain the possible risks associated with the transition to alternative DBMSs.

How to minimize potential migration risks? Automated tools allow you to determine the compatibility of existing applications with Tibero DBMS. Special techniques help make a decision: whether such a transition or migration makes sense for one reason or another is not advisable. TmaxSoft hopes that greater confidence in the success of migration and a desire to rationalize budgets will spur the process. However, the transition from Orakle to PostgreSQL is also a regular task. For this there is a special software that allows you 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 DBMS segment is accelerating - the same Oracle is moving in this direction. TmaxSoft plans to present its IaaS and PaaS services for private and public clouds this year. They should complement the affordable licensed technologies of the DBMS and enterprise-class middleware.

Currently, the Tibero version of the Enterprise Edition DBMS offers a number of options for free, but the popularity of Tibero is constrained by the still-growing 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 insecure. And the PostgreSQL DBMS developers are even sure that it has everything it needs to become the main DBMS used in government and commercial development with minimal government support.

This means diversification of the database market. Customers receive an alternative when the cost of a DBMS becomes too high, or because of sanctions, you have to look for other options - commercial or open source software. Much depends on the database selection criteria, such as performance, security, scalability, support, big data and cost of ownership.