November 23, 2011
Hope for a new PostgreSQL era?
In a comedy of briefing errors, I’m not too clear on the details of my client salesforce.com’s new PostgreSQL-as-a-service offering, nor exactly on what my clients at VMware are bringing to the PostgreSQL virtualization/cloud party. That said:
- PostgreSQL is good technology.
- MySQL is narrowing the gap, but PostgreSQL is still ahead of MySQL in some ways. (Database extensibility if nothing else.)
- PostgreSQL has a lot of users. (Many of them in academia and/or Russia.)
- Neither EnterpriseDB (which now calls itself “The enterprise PostgreSQL company”) nor the PostgreSQL community leadership have covered themselves with stewardship glory.
- A significant number of interesting DBMS products can be regarded as PostgreSQL forks (e.g. Greenplum, Aster Data nCluster, Netezza if you squint, and Vertica if you stand on your head*).
- PostgreSQL advancement is not dead. For example, Hadapt beta users are running actual PostgreSQL on many nodes each.
- There’s no assurance that Oracle will be a benevolent MySQL steward forever. (Specifically, Oracle’s “Play nicely with others” antitrust commitments expire in 2014.)
So I think it would be cool if one or the other big company put significant wood behind the PostgreSQL arrow.
*While Vertica was originally released using little or no PostgreSQL code — reports varied — it featured high degrees of PostgreSQL compatibility.
Categories: Aster Data, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Greenplum, MySQL, Netezza, Open source, salesforce.com, Vertica Systems
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8 Responses to “Hope for a new PostgreSQL era?”
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hear (on Brazil) many companies uses Postgres, including the brazilian government, the subway system… We have so many cases of success!! We are on the PostgreSQL era!!
PostgreSQL is a candidate number 1 to
National RDBMS in Russia !
I have always assumed that the data warehouse forks used PostgreSQL at least in part because of the BSD licensing. You can fork PostgreSQL to create closed source products. By contrast the viable MySQL forks/clones (e.g., Percona or MariaDB) are open source under GPL V2 or a mix of BSD/GPL V2 like drizzle. I’m curious if any of your data warehousing contacts have commented on this aspect.
Also, to be fair you would have to say that PostgreSQL has some catching up to do with MySQL/InnoDB in some areas. Logical replication and support for uncached writes to storage (O_DIRECT) rather than via the OS page cache come lightly to mind.
Robert,
No doubt you are correct on the licensing.
I would like some citations / reference for these points. Specifically when you state that “nor the PostgreSQL community leadership have covered themselves with stewardship glory.” what exactly do you mean? The current community has been making some very interesting progress on many fronts and the support I get from the mailing list has been nothing short of phenomenal. I’d like to know what you view as the shortcomings of the community.
One thing I’d suggest is that we already have a strong open source fork (not quite to 1.0) in the data warehouse space, namely Postgres-XC. This is a system that gives you high quality, transactional, distributed database similar to Teradata, and it’s at 0.9.6 at present.
Robert: no-logged tables are available in Pg 9.1, and you now have both synchronous and async replication built in.
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