Oracle to PostgreSQL Migration Savings

Estimate the 5-year ROI of escaping commercial licensing by factoring in both ongoing savings and the one-time engineering cost of migration.

Migration Business Case

Current Annual License Support

$167,200

Ongoing OPEX (excluding hardware)

Target Annual Infrastructure$15,360
PostgreSQL managed service

Estimated Migration Cost

$128,000

One-time engineering effort

Net 5-Year Savings

$631,200

Accounting for migration cost

Migration Realities

Risk: Schema conversion tools (like AWS SCT or ora2pg) will handle 80-90% of the DDL syntax, but the remaining 10% (PL/SQL, advanced queuing, XMLType) requires deep manual rewrite.

Action: Do not approve an Oracle migration based purely on license savings without running a schema compatibility assessment first. If the schema relies heavily on proprietary Oracle features, the migration timeline will blow past initial estimates.

The Licensing Exit Plan

Moving an Oracle workload to a cloud-managed PostgreSQL service like Amazon Aurora or Azure Database for PostgreSQL eliminates the restrictive, core-based commercial licensing model.

Recommendation: Do not look at the license savings in isolation. Migrating away from Oracle requires a full schema conversion, PL/SQL rewrite, and application data-access layer testing. Ensure your business case includes the engineering capital required to execute the switch safely.