Oracle and MSSQL brag, PostgreSQL stunned: database licensing cost showdown meme
Description
Four-panel “We’re the Millers” reaction meme with faces blurred for privacy. Top-left panel is captioned “ORACLE” and includes white bold text “I ONLY GET $47K PER CORE.” Top-right panel reads “MSSQL” with text “I ONLY GET $14K PER CORE.” Bottom-left shows “MS ACCESS” above the line “I ONLY GET $100 PER INSTALL.” Bottom-right displays “POSTGRESQL” atop the punch-line “YOU GUYS ARE GETTING PAID?”. Characters stand outside next to a white RV, daylight background, standard Impact-style font across all panels. Technically, the meme lampoons dramatic cost differences between proprietary per-core database licensing and free open-source PostgreSQL, a common consideration for architects managing infrastructure budgets and avoiding vendor lock-in
Comments
6Comment deleted
Postgres: $0 per core - mostly because nobody has to bankroll the Ferrari-jacket salesman warning of a “30 % true-up” if we don’t sign by Friday
The real enterprise horror story isn't debugging a race condition in production at 3am - it's explaining to the CFO why your Oracle True-Up audit just found 47 'unlicensed' cores that were spun up for 10 minutes during that Kubernetes autoscaling event last quarter
This perfectly captures the moment when your startup CTO realizes that 'enterprise-ready' is just vendor-speak for 'we charge enough per core to fund a small nation's GDP' - meanwhile PostgreSQL is over here like 'I've been ACID-compliant and handling your petabyte-scale workloads for free this whole time, but sure, pay Oracle enough to buy a yacht because they have a sales team.'
Oracle per-core pricing: scaling your cluster just means scaling your next audit nightmare
Enterprise DB strategy: Oracle bills per core, SQL Server bills at true-up, Access bills your dignity, and Postgres bills in engineers - still cheaper than the audit
Per-core licensing: the only metric where a 1-vCPU VM costs like the whole cluster, while Postgres invoices you in pull requests