August 11, 2008

EnterpriseDB update

I had lunch today with CTO Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB, who turns out to live in almost the same town I do (they technically separated in 1783, but share a high school today). DBMS-related highlights included:

EnterpriseDB thinks PostgreSQL training and certification are a big deal for increasing PostgreSQL adoption.
EnterpriseDB’s business focus right now (at least, one of them) is moving developers from interest to download to deployment and payment — i.e., the standard funnel for open source and open-source-inspired products.
EnterpriseDB finds it important to be a good PostgreSQL community citizen. This makes a lot of sense, as EnterpriseDB doesn’t control the core PostgreSQL engine, even if it does employ some of the core PostgreSQL developers.
But “open source” is not the same as “free”.
I got the impression that the GridSQL technology EnterpriseDB acquired is being used to go after general read-mostly, horizontally-scaling applications (i.e., MySQL’s sweet spot). I did not get the impression, by way of contrast, that EnterpriseDB is out to play catch-up — e.g., with GreenPlum — in MPP data warehousing.
Bob pointed out that something like “Vacuum” to clean up the database periodically is needed in a MVCC (MultiVersion Concurrency Control) engine. He thinks PostgreSQL’s autovacuum is good but not ideal.
Bob draws this as yet another two-dimensional positioning graph, but in essence he thinks PostgreSQL and Postgres Plus are well-suited for a large space that’s above MySQL and below Oracle. I don’t think he really contradicted Kee Kwan’s opinion that there are good times to use PostgreSQL and good times to use MySQL.
I was wrong when I previously said EnterpriseDB now offers MySQL portability. It just offers MySQL migration.
The Elastra/EnterpriseDB cloud offering isn’t generally available yet.
Stay tuned for developments in replication/high availability.

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