Event Store vs Oracle: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will examine the key differences between Event Store and Oracle.

1. Storage Model: Event Store is based on an event sourcing architecture, where events are stored as the primary source of truth. It provides an append-only log of events, allowing for easy auditing and time-based querying. On the other hand, Oracle uses a traditional relational database model for data storage, with tables and rows to organize information.

2. Data Replication: Event Store supports multi-master replication out of the box, allowing for data synchronization across multiple nodes or clusters. This ensures high availability and fault tolerance. In contrast, Oracle requires additional configuration and setup for replication, making it more complex to achieve a distributed database setup.

3. Scalability: Event Store is designed to scale horizontally, which means it can handle increased workload by adding more nodes to the cluster. It achieves this through its partitioning and sharding capabilities, allowing for efficient data distribution. Oracle, on the other hand, primarily scales vertically, where additional resources such as CPU, memory, or storage are added to a single node.

4. Querying Capabilities: Event Store provides a powerful and flexible querying mechanism using its Event Query Language (EQL). EQL allows for querying events based on different criteria, such as event types, timestamps, or metadata. Oracle, being a relational database, uses SQL for querying, which is more structured and restrictive compared to EQL.

5. Event-Driven Architecture: Event Store is inherently built for event-driven architectures, where events serve as the main mechanism for communication and data flow between different components of the system. It provides features like event publishing, subscriptions, and projections to handle event-driven workflows efficiently. Oracle, although capable of handling events through triggers and stored procedures, is not specifically designed for event-driven architectures.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Event Store has a growing community and ecosystem focused on event-driven architectures, with various frameworks, libraries, and tools available to support its usage. Oracle, being a widely-used relational database, has a larger and more mature ecosystem, with a wide range of tools and integrations available for different use cases.

In summary, Event Store offers a storage model based on event sourcing, supports multi-master replication, scales horizontally, provides a flexible querying mechanism with EQL, is well-suited for event-driven architectures, and has a growing community and ecosystem. On the other hand, Oracle uses a relational database model, requires additional setup for replication, scales primarily vertically, uses SQL for querying, supports events through triggers and procedures, and has a larger and more mature ecosystem.