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Genuine Question - have you migrated DBMS on a Production System which wouldn't have been possible with vendor lock-in on the backend? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by aluminium@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

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This is something I have thought a lot recently since I recently saw a project that absolute didn't care in the slightest about this and used many vendor specific features of MS SQL all over the place which had many advantages in terms of performance optimizations.

Basically everyone always advises you to write your backend so generically with technologies like ODBC, JDBC, Hibernate, ... and never use anything vendor specific like stored procedures, vendor specific datatypes or meta queries with the argument being that you can later switch your DBMS without much hassle.

I really wonder if this actually happens in the real world with production Software or if this is just some advice that makes sense on surface level but in reality never pans out. I personally haven't seen any large piece of Software switch to a different DBMS, even if there would be long term advantages of doing so, because the risk and work to retest everything would be far too great.

The only examples I know of (like SAP) were really part of a much larger rewrite or update rather than "just" switching DBMS.

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[–] Modva@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

30 years experience running enterprise development teams here. Switching databases has happened once for me, Sql Server to Postgres. We were busy with a huge rewrite of something existing, approx $100 million project for a major company.

The instruction to switch dbs came midway through the project, basically on the whim of the CIO. Luckily we were only lightly impacted by db specific features on a couple procs, but code base was abstracted away - which made it achievable.