Apparent turmoil at EnterpriseDB

EnterpriseDB seems to be facing a string of management departures:

• Bob Zurek, EnterpriseDB’s well-regarded CTO, is gone. (He landed at Infobright, after a stint of independent consulting.)
• Multiple rumors have founder Andy Astor leaving EnterpriseDB, and stepping back to an advisory role. One version has Tuesday, June 16 as Andy’s last day. Update: As of Wednesday, June 17, Andy Astor is no longer listed as being on EnterpriseDB’s management team.
• Fred Holahan, who was briefly VP of Marketing, is not listed on  EnterpriseDB’s management team web page.  And EnterpriseDB announced a new VP of Marketing and Product Management on May 21.
• Other rumors point to turmoil at EnterpriseDB as well.

And by the way, EnterpriseDB, which used to call itself “the Oracle-compatible database company,” recently licensed out what used to be its core differentiating technology.

Now, this isn’t all bad news. EnterpriseDB’s Oracle-compatibility focus had to be changed anyway. And Fred Holahan was the proximate cause for me writing:

my recent dealings with EnterpriseDB underscore the importance of being VERY careful about counting your fingers after you shake hands with that company,

Still, these aren’t exactly indicators of a company executing on a smooth-running plan.

IBM’s Oracle emulation strategy reconsidered

I’ve now had a chance to talk with IBM about its recently-announced Oracle emulation strategy for DB2. (This is for DB2 9.7, which I gather has been quasi-announced in April, will be re-announced in May, and will be re-re-announced as being in general availability in June.)

Key points include:

• This really is more like Oracle emulation than it is transparency, a term I carelessly used before.
• IBM’s Oracle emulation effort is focused on two technological goals:
  • Making it easy for an Oracle application to be ported to DB2.
  • Making it easy for an Oracle developer to develop for DB2.
• The initial target market for DB2’s Oracle emulation is ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) much more than it is enterprises. IBM suggested there were a couple hundred early adopters, and those are primarily in the ISV area.

Because of Oracle’s market share, many ISVs focus on Oracle as the underlying database management system for their applications, whether or not they actually resell it along with their own software. IBM proposed three reasons why such ISVs might want to support DB2:

Read more

DBMS transparency layers never seem to sell well

A DBMS transparency layer, roughly speaking, is software that makes things that are written for one brand of database management system run unaltered on another.* These never seem to sell well. ANTs has failed in a couple of product strategies. EnterpriseDB’s Oracle compatibility only seems to have netted it a few sales, and only a small fraction of its total business. ParAccel’s and Dataupia’s transparency strategies have produced even less.

*The looseness in that definition highlights a key reason these technologies don’t sell well — it’s hard to be sure that what you’re buying will do a good job of running your particular apps.

This subject comes to mind for two reasons. One is that IBM seems to have licensed EnterpriseDB’s Oracle transparency layer for DB2. The other is that a natural upgrade path from MySQL to Oracle might be a MySQL transparency layer on top of an Oracle base.

Read more

First thoughts on Oracle acquiring Sun

• Wow.
• And during the week of the MySQL conference, too.
• In the must-read slide presentation, Oracle’s says all the right things about being committed to all product lines and technologies. On the whole, this is believable.
• Oracle says it’s focusing Sun hardware sales on existing Oracle/Sun customers. Makes sense.
• Oracle mentions OpenStorage prominently. Makes sense. Integrating DBMS with storage is Oracle’s high-end DBMS future.  (E.g., Exadata.)
• HP can’t be happy.
• MySQL and InnoDB are reunited.
• MySQL is apt to get decent, much as it would have under IBM.
• Even so, if you really believe in open source’s freedom, it’s time to look at PostgreSQL …
• … or EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus, although my recent dealings with EnterpriseDB underscore the importance of being VERY careful about counting your fingers after you shake hands with that company.
• And I wouldn’t be surprised if another shoe dropped soon on the EnterpriseDB front. (Please excuse the mixed metaphor.)
• I used to laugh at how many different app servers Sun had acquired. Oracle acquired a number too.  Together it’s quite a pile of them.
• Oracle says acquiring Java is a great big deal. I’m not sure I see why that would really be true.

More later.  I have a radio interview in a few minutes on a very different subject.

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

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.)

EnterpriseDB unveils Postgres Plus

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

• Renaming/repositioning the product as “Postgres Plus.” The free product is now Postgres Plus, while the version you pay EnterpriseDB for is now Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
• Repackaging the products, so that Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a strict superset of Postgres Plus.
• New features added to Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
• Features newly migrated from Advanced Server down to Postgres Plus.
• A strategic investment by IBM.
• Stressing Postgres in EnterpriseDB marketing, and dropping the tag-line defining themselves as “the Oracle-compatible database company.”

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

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

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:

• EnterpriseDB reports good traction with ISVs. In particular, those that resell Oracle would like a cheaper alternative. Sometimes, they can port their code with no rewriting at all.
• Online businesses of various kinds also are a significant fraction of the customer base.
• EnterpriseDB has some true large-enterprise customers — Derek rattled off some household names — but this isn’t yet the heart of its business.
• EnterpriseDB has an increasing business teleselling to SMBs.

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

EnterpriseDB on Elastra, early stages

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

• There have been dozens of applicants for the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta program. As is usual in limited beta programs, EnterpriseDB is trying to sort out the ones who’ll make a big commitment from the tire-kickers.
• The main interest in EnterpriseDB/Elastra has come from ISVs, and secondarily from purely online businesses (e.g., SaaS vendors, web businesses, and a large MMO game vendor). There’s been a little interest from enterprises.
• Significant fractions of the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta applications come from each of the Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL user communities. A few come from SQL Server. None come from DB2.
• Bob praised Elastra for its technology in clustering, starting/stopping instances, etc. He also said that EnterpriseDB had “educated” Elastra on EnterpriseDB internals and/or admin tools, to make the integration work.
• EnterpriseDB will start turning on a few beta Elastra customers any day now (i.e., it may well not take until March, the original target).

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.

EnterpriseDB joins Elastra in the Amazon cloud

When Elastra announced their service to host MySQL and PostgreSQL in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud, I immediately told my dear darling clients at EnterpriseDB they should do the same. Whereupon they told me it would happen soon. However, they neglected to tell me when it was actually announced. So I know no more than can be found in this Computerworld article.

But I’ll say this — it’s a very tempting option, both for new web-based applications or businesses, or simply as a development platform pending later redeployment.

What hard-core transactional applications have actually been built in MySQL, PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB, or FileMaker?

And here’s the biggie.

Question of the day #3

What complex, high-volume transactional applications have actually been built in mid-range DBMS such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, FileMaker, or EnterpriseDB?

I’ve been flamed for suggesting that MySQL or FileMaker aren’t fully equal to Oracle and DB2 in supporting hard-core transactional applications. (Which is ironic, because I’ve also been flamed for suggesting hard-core transactional support isn’t as big a deal for DBMS selection as some relational purists insist. But I digress …) So I’m putting the question out there — what impressive transactional applications do the stand-alone mid-range DBMS actually support? Read more

What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize

For very high-end applications, the list of viable database management systems is short. Scalability can be a problem. (The rankings of most scalable alternatives differ in the OLTP and data warehouse realms.) Extreme levels of security can be had from only a few DBMS. (Oracle would have you believe there’s only one choice.) And if you truly need 99.99% uptime, there only are a few DBMS you even should consider.

But for most applications at any enterprise – and for all applications at most enterprises – super high-end DBMS aren’t required. There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. Ingres and Progress OpenEdge aren’t far behind (they’re a little lacking in datatype support). Ditto Intersystems Cache’, although the nonrelational architecture will be off-putting to many. And to varying degrees, you can also do fine with MySQL, Pervasive PSQL, MaxDB, or a variety of other products – or for that matter with the cheap or free crippled versions of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Informix.

What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. Read more

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