EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus

Analysis of EnterpriseDB and especially its PostgreSQL-based Postgres Plus product line. Related subjects include:

April 29, 2008

Truviso and EnterpriseDB blend event processing with ordinary database management

Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:

  • There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.

  • Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.

  • If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.

Read more

April 10, 2008

Supporting evidence for the DBMS disruption story

As previously announced, I did a webcast this afternoon, discussing database diversity. The title of the talk was taken directly from a post – What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize — that argued mid-range DBMS are suitable for a broad variety of tasks. The overriding theme was a Clayton Christensen-style “disruption” narrative.

The sponsor was EnterpriseDB, which is fitting. While not the biggest DBMS industry disrupter in terms of revenue or visible impact (MySQL and Netezza say “Hi”), the Postgres family in general and EnterpriseDB in particular epitomize the disruption threat like nobody else, because of how broadly they substitute for market-leading database managers.

As I promised on the call, below is a post with links to further research backing up the points made. They’re numbered to match some of the presentation slides, which you can find at this link.

3. Much of the discussion of database diversity comes from a series of posts I coordinated with Mike Stonebraker.

4. At various times, starting on Slide 4, I made reference to datatype extensibility, a key feature of Oracle and DB2 – and a key advantage of Postgres over MySQL.

10. Capping off the database diversity discussion, Slide 10 mirrors this 11-point version of a data management software taxonomy.

13-14. I’ve posted many times about data warehousing DBMS and related technologies, including this overview of major analytic DBMS products, another recent overview of data warehouse specialty technologies, and an attempt to distinguish between data warehouse appliance myths and realities. Of particular interest for further research may be our sections on data warehouse appliances and columnar DBMS.

15. I do most of my posting about text search over on Text Technologies, specifically in the search category. Vendors I specifically mentioned as blending search with other kinds of data retrieval were Mark Logic and Attivio.

16. There’s a section here on native XML database management.

17. We also have a section on managing RDF and other graphical data models.

18. Ditto complex event/stream processing.

19. The only embeddable DBMS I’ve written much about recently is solidDB. And frankly, even in that case I’ve focused more on mid-tier caching uses, the now-canceled MySQL relationship, or general technology than I did specifically on embedded uses.

22-24. Back in February, 2007 I made what is probably still my clearest post explaining why I think market-leading DBMS vendors are in the process of getting disrupted

April 2, 2008

Webcast on database diversity Wednesday April 9 2 pm Eastern

Once or twice a year, EnterpriseDB sponsors a webcast for me. The last two were super well-attended. And most people stayed to the end, which is generally an encouraging sign!

The emphasis this time is on alternatives to the market-leading DBMS. I’ll highlight the advantages of both data warehousing specialists and general-purpose mid-range DBMS (naturally focusing on the latter, given who the sponsor is). The provocative title is taken from a January, 2008 post — What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize. If you read every word of this blog, there probably won’t be much new for you. 🙂 But I’d love to have you listen in and perhaps ask a question anyway!

You can register on EnterpriseDB’s webcast page, which also has an archived webcast I did for them in October, 2007.

March 25, 2008

GridSQL: What EnterpriseDB is and is not doing in Postgres-based MPP data warehousing

While talking with EnterpriseDB about today’s Postgres Plus announcements, I took the chance to clear up a point of confusion. Somebody told Seth Grimes that EnterpriseDB is out to compete with Greenplum, but that person was wrong. EnterpriseDB fondly hopes to manage multi-terabyte data warehouses, just as Oracle and Microsoft do with their respective general-purpose DBMS. However, EnterpriseDB is not going after the 10s-100s of terabytes sized DBMS that are the province of specialists such as Greenplum, Teradata, Netezza, or columnar DBMS vendors.

Even so, in GridSQL EnterpriseDB does seem to be open-sourcing MPP shared-nothing basics. There’s a lightweight optimizer that does a little (but only a little) more to minimize data movement beyond just optimizing queries on each node. And GridSQL knows how to replicate small tables across each node, a key aspect of many MPP designs. (Partition your facts; replicate your dimensions.)

March 25, 2008

EnterpriseDB unveils Postgres Plus

EnterpriseDB is making a series of moves and announcements. Highlights include:

So far as I can tell, most of the technical differences between Advanced Server and regular Postgres Plus lie in three areas: Read more

March 6, 2008

PostgreSQL can be used in a lot of different ways

The relational DBMS industry is filled with startups. In some way or other, most of them are based on or make use of the open source project PostgreSQL. (Not all, of course; exceptions include DATAllegro and Infobright, which are based on Ingres and MySQL respectively.) But how they use PostgreSQL varies greatly. Read more

March 6, 2008

Who EnterpriseDB sells to

I previously wrote that EnterpriseDB-on-Elastra has very little enterprise traction, drawing most of its interest instead from online businesses or ISVs. Having used that as a starting point in a recent chat with EnterpriseDB marketing chief Derek Rodner, I can now add that overall:

February 15, 2008

Database management system choices — mid-range-relational

This is the fourth of a five-part series on database management system choices. For the first post in the series, please click here.

The other threat to the high-end relational DBMS vendors aims squarely at the heart of their business. It’s the mid-range relational database management systems, which are doing an ever-larger fraction of what their high-end cousins can. That said, different products do different things well. So if you’re not blindly paying up for the security of an all-things-to-all-people high-end DBMS, there are a number of factors you might want to consider.

Read more

February 14, 2008

EnterpriseDB on Elastra, early stages

I finally caught up with Bob Zurek about EnterpriseDB’s foray into the Elastra cloud. Here are some highlights:

February 5, 2008

PostgreSQL speeds up OLTP

The Register reports on PostgreSQL 8.3, and emphasizes OLTP speedups and reductions in administrative burden:

Among the changes, Heap Only Tuples (HOT) that may cut the maintenance overhead of frequently updated tables by up to 75 per cent, spread checkpoints and background writer autotuning to reduce the impact of check points on response times, and an asynchronous commit option that also speeds the response times of certain transactions.

I wonder how EnterpriseDB compares on these features.

Edit: Slashdot has discussion and links. And here’s a PostgreSQL feature matrix.

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