Database Migration · Zero Data Loss · 70-85% Cost Savings

Oracle to PostgreSQL Migration
End Oracle Licensing Costs Forever

Migrate your Oracle databases to PostgreSQL with zero data loss. Schema conversion, stored procedure migration, performance benchmarking, and a complete rollback strategy — all handled by certified database engineers.

See Migration Process

Oracle Licensing Is Bleeding Your Budget

Oracle Enterprise Edition licensing runs at approximately $47,500 per processor core. Add RAC ($23,000/core), Partitioning ($11,500/core), Advanced Security ($15,000/core), and Diagnostics Pack ($7,500/core) — and a modest 4-core deployment costs over $400,000 in licence fees alone, before annual support at 22%.

Oracle audits add risk. Virtualisation, cloud migration, and hardware changes can trigger unexpected compliance gaps and true-up costs running into crores.

PostgreSQL eliminates all of this. Zero licence fees. Zero per-core charges. Zero audit risk. Enterprise-grade performance, HA, and security — without the enterprise price tag.

70-85%
Annual Cost Savings
12-18mo
ROI Payback Period
Zero
Licence Audit Risk
22%
Oracle Annual Support You Stop Paying

Our 6-Phase Migration Process

1

Discovery & Assessment

Inventory all Oracle objects — tables, views, indexes, sequences, synonyms, packages, procedures, functions, triggers, and materialised views. Profile data volumes, usage patterns, and application dependencies. Generate an ora2pg migration complexity report.

2

Schema Conversion

Convert Oracle DDL to PostgreSQL using ora2pg with manual refinement. Map Oracle data types (NUMBER, VARCHAR2, CLOB, BLOB, DATE, TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE) to PostgreSQL equivalents. Recreate indexes, constraints, partitions, and table spaces.

3

Code Migration

Convert PL/SQL packages, procedures, functions, and triggers to PL/pgSQL. Refactor Oracle-specific SQL (CONNECT BY, DECODE, NVL, ROWNUM, MODEL clause) to PostgreSQL-compatible syntax. Update application queries across all layers.

4

Data Migration

Bulk data transfer using ora2pg, pgLoader, or custom ETL pipelines. Handle character set conversion (AL32UTF8 to UTF-8), LOB migration, and sequence value synchronisation. Validate row counts, checksums, and referential integrity post-transfer.

5

Performance Tuning

Benchmark PostgreSQL against Oracle baselines. Optimise query plans with EXPLAIN ANALYZE. Tune postgresql.conf (shared_buffers, work_mem, effective_cache_size, wal_level). Create missing indexes, configure connection pooling (PgBouncer), and set up vacuum schedules.

6

Cutover & Validation

Execute the planned cutover with minimal downtime. Final data sync via CDC. Application switchover with connection string update. Run automated validation suite — row counts, data checksums, query result comparisons. Monitor for 30-60 days post-cutover with Oracle on standby.

Oracle vs PostgreSQL — Feature Comparison

Feature Oracle Enterprise PostgreSQL 16
Licence Cost $47,500/core + 22% annual support Free — open source (PostgreSQL Licence)
High Availability RAC ($23,000/core add-on) Patroni, Citus, streaming replication (free)
Disaster Recovery Data Guard (included in EE) Streaming replication + pg_basebackup (free)
Partitioning $11,500/core add-on Native — range, list, hash (free)
JSON Support JSON, JSON_TABLE (21c+) JSONB with GIN indexing, JSON path queries
Full-Text Search Oracle Text (included in EE) tsvector/tsquery with GiST/GIN indexes (free)
Encryption at Rest TDE ($15,000/core Advanced Security) pgcrypto + LUKS/dm-crypt disk encryption (free)
Stored Procedures PL/SQL PL/pgSQL, PL/Python, PL/Perl, PL/V8
Audit Compliance Audit Vault ($11,500/core) pgAudit extension (free)

What We Migrate

Schema Objects

Tables, views, materialised views, indexes (B-tree, bitmap, function-based), constraints (PK, FK, CHECK, UNIQUE), sequences, synonyms, and database links. Full DDL conversion with data type mapping.

PL/SQL Code

Packages (spec + body), standalone procedures, functions, triggers (row-level, statement-level, compound), and type definitions. Automated conversion with ora2pg plus manual refactoring of complex logic.

Data & ETL

Full data migration with character set conversion, LOB handling (CLOB/BLOB to TEXT/BYTEA), partitioned table data, and sequence value sync. Automated validation with row count and checksum comparison.

Application Layer

Update JDBC/ODBC drivers, connection strings, and ORM configurations. Refactor Oracle-specific SQL in application code (Java, Python, .NET, PHP). Update connection pooling from Oracle UCP to PgBouncer.

Security & Audit

Migrate Oracle roles, grants, and privileges to PostgreSQL RBAC. Configure pgAudit for compliance logging. Set up row-level security (RLS) policies, SSL/TLS encryption, and SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication.

Monitoring & HA

Replace Oracle Enterprise Manager with pgAdmin, Grafana + pg_stat_statements, and Prometheus postgres_exporter. Deploy Patroni for automatic failover, PgBouncer for connection pooling, and pgBackRest for backup.

Oracle to PostgreSQL — SQL Syntax Mapping

Oracle SQL PostgreSQL Equivalent Notes
NVL(a, b) COALESCE(a, b) COALESCE supports multiple arguments
SYSDATE NOW() / CURRENT_TIMESTAMP NOW() includes timezone
DECODE(x, a, b, c) CASE WHEN x=a THEN b ELSE c END CASE is SQL standard
ROWNUM <= n LIMIT n / FETCH FIRST n ROWS FETCH FIRST is SQL:2008 standard
CONNECT BY PRIOR WITH RECURSIVE ... CTE Recursive CTEs are more flexible
sequence.NEXTVAL nextval('sequence') Function syntax vs dotted notation
VARCHAR2(n) VARCHAR(n) / TEXT TEXT has no length limit in PostgreSQL
NUMBER(p,s) NUMERIC(p,s) / INTEGER / BIGINT Use native integer types where possible

Migration Toolchain

ora2pg

Automated schema and PL/SQL conversion. Migration complexity scoring. Handles 60-80% of conversion automatically.

pgLoader

High-speed parallel data loading directly from Oracle. Supports data type casting, on-the-fly transformations, and error handling.

Patroni + etcd

Production-grade HA for PostgreSQL. Automatic leader election, failover, and cluster management. Replaces Oracle RAC.

PgBouncer

Lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL. Transaction-level pooling supports thousands of concurrent connections with minimal overhead.

Who Should Migrate

Enterprises on Oracle SE2/EE

You are paying lakhs in annual Oracle licence fees and support for workloads that PostgreSQL handles equally well. Your Oracle deployment does not use Exadata-specific features, Advanced Analytics, or Spatial and Graph. Migration delivers immediate and compounding cost savings.

Cloud-First Organisations

Moving to AWS, Azure, or GCP? All three offer managed PostgreSQL (RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Cloud SQL). Oracle licensing on cloud is complex and expensive — BYOL rules, vCPU-to-core mapping, and audit complications make PostgreSQL the natural choice for cloud workloads.

Audit-Fatigued Companies

Oracle LMS audits cause months of disruption and often result in unexpected true-up demands. If you are facing an audit, or have recently completed one with a costly settlement, migrating to PostgreSQL eliminates this recurring risk permanently.

Startups Scaling Up

You inherited Oracle from an early architecture decision or an acquisition. As you scale, Oracle per-core costs become unsustainable. PostgreSQL scales horizontally with Citus, supports modern patterns (JSONB, partitioning, logical replication), and attracts a much larger developer pool.

Ready to Break Free from Oracle Licensing?

Get a free migration assessment. We will analyse your Oracle estate, estimate costs and timeline, and provide a detailed migration plan — no obligation.

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Frequently Asked Questions

The timeline depends on database complexity, size, and the number of PL/SQL stored procedures. A small database (under 100 GB, fewer than 200 objects) can be migrated in 4-6 weeks. Medium complexity (100-500 GB, 500+ objects, heavy PL/SQL) takes 8-16 weeks. Large enterprise migrations with thousands of procedures and application dependencies can take 3-6 months. We provide a detailed timeline after the initial assessment.

We design migrations to minimise downtime. Using logical replication and CDC (Change Data Capture), we keep Oracle and PostgreSQL in sync during the transition period. The actual cutover window — where the application switches from Oracle to PostgreSQL — is typically 1-4 hours depending on final data sync volume. For zero-downtime requirements, we implement blue-green database deployments.

PostgreSQL has mature equivalents for most Oracle HA features. Oracle RAC maps to PostgreSQL Patroni or Citus for high availability and horizontal scaling. Data Guard maps to PostgreSQL streaming replication with automatic failover via Patroni. Partitioning, materialized views, and advanced indexing are all natively supported in PostgreSQL 15+.

We use ora2pg for automated conversion of PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL, which handles 60-80% of procedures automatically. The remaining procedures require manual refactoring — typically those using Oracle-specific packages (DBMS_OUTPUT, UTL_FILE, DBMS_LOB), dynamic SQL with EXECUTE IMMEDIATE, or bulk collect operations. We validate every converted procedure with unit tests.

We map all Oracle-specific SQL to PostgreSQL equivalents. Common conversions include NVL to COALESCE, SYSDATE to NOW(), DECODE to CASE, ROWNUM to ROW_NUMBER() or LIMIT, CONNECT BY to recursive CTEs, and sequence syntax differences. Application code (Java, Python, .NET) is updated to use PostgreSQL-compatible queries. We provide a complete syntax mapping document.

Oracle licensing costs typically run between 30-60 lakhs per year for a mid-size deployment (Enterprise Edition, 2-4 CPU cores, RAC, Partitioning, Diagnostics Pack). PostgreSQL is open source with zero licence fees. Even accounting for commercial support subscriptions (EDB, Percona, Crunchy Data) and migration costs, most organisations recover their migration investment within 12-18 months and save 70-85% on annual database costs.

Yes. Oracle Forms can be migrated to modern web frameworks (React, Angular) with a PostgreSQL backend. Oracle Reports can be replaced with Jasper Reports, BIRT, or custom reporting dashboards. We assess each form and report for complexity and provide a migration path. For large Oracle Forms estates, we recommend a phased approach — migrate the database first, then modernize the front-end.

Every migration includes a documented rollback plan. During the parallel-run phase, Oracle remains fully operational as the primary database. We maintain bidirectional data sync so you can switch back to Oracle at any point. Post-cutover, we keep Oracle available in read-only mode for 30-60 days as a safety net. Rollback can be executed within 2 hours at any point during this period.