The Indian state of Telangana has migrated its MeeSeva public-services platform from Oracle to open-source PostgreSQL. State officials say dropping Oracle licences could reduce annual costs by about 100 million rupees.
The migration was completed in April 2026 after work that began in 2023. MeeSeva has been running for about 15 years, offers more than 500 services to citizens and businesses, and handles around 80,000 transactions a day. Project lead Hari Kiran said the platform had processed nearly 200 million transactions across 5,000 service centres.
The work covered more than 85 microservices, three Oracle servers and 1,939 tables. The team used Ora2Pg, an open-source tool created by French database expert Gilles Darold. It automated about 60% to 70% of the conversion. Engineers had to adapt application code, validate data and tune performance manually. At one stage, both databases received writes so PostgreSQL could be tested before the final switch.
The Hindu reported that the migration involved less than four hours of downtime. Kiran said there was no data loss or critical problem after the switch and that the PostgreSQL database had recorded no incidents for two quarters. The project included a rollback plan and automatic failover to a backup database, with a target recovery time of about 30 seconds.
Commissioner for Electronic Services Delivery Ravikiran Tirumala put Oracle licensing and maintenance at about 100 million rupees a year. Darold cited an annual cost of roughly $1.2 million and said the migration itself cost less than $120,000. Moving to open-source software does not make operations free. Infrastructure, engineers, cybersecurity, backups, monitoring and support still require funding.
The state’s experience does not mean every government system can move to PostgreSQL without risk. Some MeeSeva services had no staging environments, so the team had to simulate production loads and validate data integrity before launch. Officials also reviewed the plan through several committees because a failure could disrupt public access to services.