Met Office swaps Oracle for PostgreSQL

UK weather service, the Met Office, has started swapping Oracle for PostgreSQL in a strategy to deploy more open source technology.

James Tomkins, data services portfolio technical lead at the Met Office, said: "Traditionally we have always used Oracle as our relational database management system. It is quite a difficult monopoly break."

He said the Met Office wanted to reduce its dependency due to the cost of annual support and maintenance, in a broader initiative to embrace open source software across the organisation.

As Computer Weekly has previously reported, the Government Service Design Manual recommends: "Where appropriate, government will procure open source solutions. When used in conjunction with compulsory open standards, open source presents significant opportunities for the design and delivery of interoperable solutions."

The manual also states that proprietary software should only be used to solve "rare problems".

"Problems which are rare, or specific to a domain, may be best answered by using software as a service, or by installing proprietary software. In such cases, take care to mitigate the risk of lock-in to a single supplier by ensuring open standards are available for interfaces," it states.

The migration away from Oracle follows on from the Met Offices open source plans to use Red Hat and PHP scripting in 2012. At the time, Met Office executive head of technology, Graham Mallin, said the Met Office used IBMs AIX proprietary operating system on its supercomputers, but was running Python internally for software, with Red Hat running on its IBM mainframes. It had 500 Red Hat desktop users, alongside 1,300 Windows users.

While MySQL is the most popular open source relational database, the Met Office was cautious over using it because it is owned by Oracle. Tomkins said there were many branches of development in MySQL source code, which would have made managing the code more difficult than if only one version existed. The Met Office selected the open source PostgreSQL relational database instead.

The Met Office considered MySQL as an open source database to replace Oracle. But the team was cautious over using it because it was owned by Oracle and there were quite a lot of branches of development in the MySQL source code. The Met Office selected PostgreSQL instead.

Rather than attempt a big bang approach to replacing Oracle, the Met Office targeted two pilot migration projects.

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Met Office swaps Oracle for PostgreSQL