EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus
Analysis of EnterpriseDB and especially its PostgreSQL-based Postgres Plus product line. Related subjects include:
Ingres update
I talked with Ingres today. Much of the call was fluff — open-source rah-rah, plus some numbers showing purported success, but so finely parsed as to be pretty meaningless. (To Ingres’ credit, they did offer to let me talk w/ their CFO, even if they offered no promises as to whether he’d offer any more substantive information.) Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Ingres, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase | 6 Comments |
Database implications if IBM acquires Sun
Reported or rumored merger discussions between IBM and Sun are generating huge amounts of discussion today (some links below). Here are some quick thoughts around the subject of how the IBM/Sun deal — if it happens — might affect the database management system industry. Read more
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.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, Open source, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
EnterpriseDB’s itemized claims of Oracle compatibility
Obviously, I’m poking around EnterpriseDB’s site this morning (in connection with their status as my client, actually). Anyhow, we all know that one of EnterpriseDB’s core claims is great Oracle-compatibility — but what exactly do they mean by that? I found a fairly clearly laid-out answer, as of last year, in this white paper and and — even more simply — in this blog post summarizing the white paper.
PostgreSQL vs. MySQL, as per EnterpriseDB
EnterpriseDB put out a white paper arguing for the superiority of PostgreSQL over MySQL, even without EnterpriseDB’s own Postgres Plus extensions. Highlights of EnterpriseDB’s opinion include:
- EnterpriseDB asserts that MyISAM is the only MySQL storage engine with decent performance.
- EnterpriseDB then bashes MyISAM for all sorts of well-deserved reasons, especially ACID-noncompliance.
- EnterpriseDB asserts that row-level triggers, lacking in MySQL but present in PostgreSQL, are the most important kind of trigger.
- EnterpriseDB claims PostgreSQL is superior in procedural language support to MySQL.
- EnterpriseDB claims PostgreSQL is superior in authentication support to MySQL.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, Open source, PostgreSQL | 17 Comments |
Oracle’s hefty price increases
Jeff Jones of IBM wrote in to point out that Oracle is slathering on the price increases. I quote: Read more
| Categories: Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Oracle | 5 Comments |
EnterpriseDB survey on open source database adoption (participation time)
CTO Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB asked me to pass along a link to a short survey on open source database adoption. He plans to release the results publicly after they are collected. Bob stressed to me that he used to be a Forrester analyst, his point being that he knows how to be analytically objective.
Looking over the 15 questions (14 of which are simple multiple-choice), he lived up quite well to the “unbiased” claim. E.g., the only Postgres option cited is PostgreSQL, rather than EnterpriseDB’s proprietary/value-added packagings. I do see one little screw-up: Several of the questions are worded as if the respondent is, enterprise-wide, running one and exactly one instance of open source DBMS. But otherwise it seems like a clean, tight, simple survey.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source | 1 Comment |
Database blades are not what they used to be
In which we bring you another instantiation of Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics: Bad jargon drives out good.
When Enterprise DB announced a partnership with Truviso for a “blade,” I naturally assumed they were using the term in a more-or-less standard way, and hence believed that it was more than a “Barney” press release.* Silly me. Rather than referring to something closely akin to “datablade,” EnterpriseDB’s “blade” program turns out to just to be a catchall set of partnerships.
*A “Barney” announcement is one whose entire content boils down to “I love you; you love me.”
According to EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek, the main features of the “blade” program include: Read more
| Categories: Data types, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source, PostgreSQL | 5 Comments |
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.
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
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL | Leave a Comment |