IBM Invests In MySQL/Oracle Competitor

stoolpigeon writes "IBM has made a move to support open source RDBMS PostgreSQL by investing in EnterpriseDB, a company that supports PostgreSQL as well as selling their own proprietary extensions to the database product. IBM participated in a $10 million funding round, though the article doesn't say how much they invested. In the past EnterpriseDB has primarily advertised itself as an Oracle competitor, though the article says, 'Derek Rodner, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy, explained that Postgres Plus 8.3 also adds in new application quick starts which are supposed to help with installation issues. They will also help in EnterpriseDB's battle against MySQL for open source database supremacy.'"

geeks want to do it right

Question: how do you properly pronounce "PostgreSQL"?

Re:geeks want to do it right

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.FAQ.html#item1.1 [postgresql.org]

PostgreSQL is pronounced Post-Gres-Q-L. (For those curious about how to say "PostgreSQL", an audio file is available.)

di bi tu

I asked my local IBM sales representive since they now sell PostgreSQL, and he gave the pronunciation in the subject line.

EnterpriseDB also has Cloud Database service

Interesting. EnterpriseDB was also in the news today for its partnership with Elastra [datacenterknowledge.com], a startup that announced a "cloud server" that lets companies quickly create database applications on Amazon's utility computing platform. "In the future, enterprises will view massive capital investment in on-premise server infrastructure to support database applications as entirely optional," said Bob Zurek, chief technology officer of EnterpriseDB, which uses Elastra to run its EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition. Maybe all that IBM money has their head in the clouds.

Re:EnterpriseDB also has Cloud Database service

Yeah, if I'm the owner of a company and not just some "Slash and Burn" CEO, I wouldn't want to have my core assets hostage to some third party _company_.

Having it in the hands of a trusted _person_ is different. If that person works for a different company, it's harder to ensure it's always that same trusted person who manages it.

Whereas if that trusted person works for you and the assets are in your company, it's a bit easier eh?

MySQL databae supremacy

Now there's an oxymoron!

MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, technically speaking. By the time you enable all the atomicity, and PostgreSQL feature set, you arrive at worse-than PostgreSQL performance.

MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, legally speaking. PostgreSQL is BSD. MySQL is anything but. Sure, the community edition is free, but it cannot be used with commercial software. In fact, there's a special "open source exception" to the license. That's not really open source. Open Source would never make you pay server licensing fees for use in commercial software, it would only make you distribute your source at worst.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

I completely agree. PostgreSQL used to be a bit slow, but for the last few years, there just isn't a reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL's license is certainly better and all the great features and SQL standards compliance makes it a no brainer, I think.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

Sadly, there's still the whole WordPress thing -- the darn program was never intended to work with anything other than MySQL at the back end. At one point there was an effort to "port" WordPress to PostgreSQL [sourceforge.net], but that fork has long since stagnated. And adding support for other databases is not on the WordPress team's short list [wordpress.org].

I wouldn't know the actual numbers any better than the next guy, but it's clear that WordPress is one of the top reasons MySQL retains such a dominant market share in the Web segment. Until WordPress adds support for multiple back-ends, MySQL will always be, at minimum, just as entrenched a product as WordPress is.

I hope that Movable Type's recent open-sourcing will eventually help effect more widespread adoption of PostgreSQL. Unlike WordPress, MT was designed from the ground up with forward-thinking features like database abstraction; it currently supports the Berkeley Database format, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, and adding support for additional back-ends is relatively easy. Perhaps if Movable Type can chip away at WordPress's market share a bit, it will in turn help relax MySQL's stranglehold on the Web market.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

MySQL, while it has come a long way, ...

Yep. It even supports "--i-am-a-dummy [mysql.com]" startup option.

Joke you not.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

2002 called. It wants its MySQList retort back.

MySQL is no longer easier to use than PostgreSQL. PG is now availabe for Windows with a nice packaged msi installer. It is as easy or easier to install under Linux/BSD/other POSIX, and is (if you assume the same level of experience with both system) far easier to administer.

Not only that, MySQL's community consists of many newbies, which makes getting help on complex issues difficult. PG on the other hand has a vibrant community consisting of highly skilled DBAs and the PG core developers themselves. I've often had help from the PG core dev team members. Finding similarly skilled MySQL help is like trying to find Dodos in Manhattan.

PostgreSQL ROCKS

As the CTO of a rapidly growing, million-dollar company that provides ASP-model information management software, I can attest that PostgreSQL is just... awesome.

It quickly and easily scales into the hundreds of millions of records with good support on commodity hardware and incredible reliability. It provides excellent data-integrity checks - it's like programming with a safety net built in! Its license is open to commercial development, the support is great, and rarely needed. We rely HEAVILY on foreign keys, constraints, and the like to ensure clean data, with a schema now at almost 200 tables, fully normalized. PostgreSQL handles 12-table joins with flair. Bonus - its syntax is highly compatible with ANSI SQL, meaning that porting a project developed on PG will easily port to Oracle or DB2, even when you use a rich database schema!

Could it be better? Yeah - replication options are weak, especially in our environment, where we have a database schema that changes daily. But even in this case, this is mitigated by hourly database snapshots created a la cron - the performance hit is minor, and the recovery time in the (very rare) event of a failure is quick. And as a former sysad, I can attest to the number of times MySQL replication got it all wrong and had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Really, I just don't understand why MySQL still gets all the press - in nearly every metric that matters, PostgreSQL wins hands-down.

Re:PostgreSQL ROCKS

I love postgres- use it to handle millions of queries per day- but let's not kid ourselves: postgres replication in the form of slony blows. I have a master DB and it plublishes to a dozen read only databases. Managing that with slony just plain sucks. The simple fact is that setting up replication with mysql is dirt simple and that's part of why people use it.

I'm thinking of giving EnterpriseDB and their custom replication engine a try.

-sirket

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

why is MySQL still that default database for hosted websites, and why do most open source web applications that I've looked at recommend a LAMP/WAMP stack?

Inertia.

Incidentally, you do know that Slashdot runs on MySQL don't you?

Yes, which is why they need to do such a large number of crazy voodoo tricks to scale.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

As the other poster said, inertia.

I run a few mysql servers in addition to postgresql and mssql servers. I LOATHE mysql. Yet I use it in a few cases. Why? Because there are a few applications I need to run which were unwisely written to only support mysql. If postgresql or any other database support is ever added to them (or I ever find the extra time to add it myself) I'll switch in a heartbeat. But for now, since I need to run those applications, I am stuck using mysql.

So don't think every mysql server running out there is running it because the admin thinks it's the best or even just-as-good of a database. (It isn't)

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

This used to be true but no longer. The most recent release series of PostgreSQL stomps MySQL in almost every area of performance. I say, "almost" because it's possible some corner cases still exist. Now that PostgreSQL properly (native binaries vs Cygwin and fast/east installation) supports Windows, only a fool would use PostgreSQL for new projects.

MySQL uses lots of non-ANSI SQL, teaching poor SQL habits. MySQL is feature poor compared to PostgreSQL, requiring involved work arounds to do what is easy in most other RDBMs. PostgreSQL's performance now completely rocks across the performance and scalability (PostgreSQL always was ahead here) spectrum.

The only thing preventing MySQL users from migrating to a superior platform is poor, non-ANSI SQL learned from using a crappy MySQL platform in the first place.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

It is true that the interface libraries are also covered by the GPL. But this can be gotten around easily enough by writing your own interface libraries

Yeah sure... we all do that (/sarcasm).

Re:MySQL license clarification: free as in freedom

The problem is that the client lib, which applications link with when they need to talk to mysql is also gpl. So I i write a
c++ program which connect to mysql, I need to release my application under a gpl compability license.

Interesting...

Here's a few random thoughts:

Having recently seen Sun buy MySQL, this looks a lot like a "me too"-move. That's not to say that it doesn't make business sense.

Last I checked, IBM makes its money from two things: hardware and support. Note that software is not one of them; the software is (to them) merely what enables them to sell their bread and butter. It's also costing them money to develop and maintain software that drives sales.

That's why they've invested money in Linux, and that's why they're investing money in Postgres: offering software with a good track record and a good reputation drives sales better, and cost is driven down as the software is open source.

Still waiting for a decent GUI

I love all these Open Source databases but what troubles me most is the absence of a decent [fully] programmable GUI to "slap" onto the actual database back-end. I would like readers to think of Access which is on top of Microsoft's jet database engine. It works and works beautifully but I loath Microsoft's products.

Can one tell me why we (in the open source world), do not have a single product that competes with Access in terms of functionality, ease of use and ease of programming business logic?

Re:Still waiting for a decent GUI

it's simple. no one in the open source world is dumb enough to WANT to be known as the access db of the open source world.

postgresql has a couple of brillant gui tools that hold their own easily against sql server managment 2005.

Re:Still waiting for a decent GUI

Uh. Because we actually do have a product like this?

OpenOffice.org has support for pulling data from a database. [linux.com]
It also has support for a forms-like [openoffice.org] interface.
It also has it's own vb-alike [openoffice.org] language. (Still in development perhaps, by the looks of it)

There are also plenty of other tools. RealBasic, etc.

Postgres: Best Intro of All Worlds

IBM buying into Postgres through EnterpriseDB is clearly a response to Sun's buying into MySQL. But what's really exciting about the move is that Sun also bought into Postgres, shipping it with Solaris 10 and integrating it with its Java App Server, as an entry-level database. Since Sun is also supporting and bundling MySQL (and therefore using it to drive sales of Sun machines), tools for porting between Postgres and MySQL are likely in the works.

Now IBM will follow suit, probably offering Postgres as an intro to selling its DB2 database, which will mean IBM tools for upgrading from Postgres to DB2. Meanwhile, EnterpriseDB already offers tools to port Oracle apps to Postgres.

The next move will probably come from Oracle. To continue the head-to-head competition, Oracle will probably offer tools for porting Postgres (and maybe MySQL) apps to Oracle. It's surprising that Oracle didn't buy a Postgres or MySQL company before Sun or IBM got them, but maybe that's why Sun bought one of each: to keep them from Oracle. Though Oracle did buy the InnoDB corp that makes the MySQL engine with serious DB features, and SleepyCat, the BerkeleyDB corp.

So as the dust settles, there could finally be a grand unification at work. IBM, Sun and Oracle each have incentive and in-house teams for producing tools to port between Postgres, MySQL and their proprietary high-end RDBMS'es. And since the lower-end (though Postgres competes well with them all) DBs are all open source, there is a good chance the upgrades will be available for freely porting among all of them.

The age of database lockin might finally be falling behind us. We might finally be free to use whichever DB is best for the job today, not determined by which DB was best for some other job yesterday.

Re:db2...

It's not rare for IBM to sell stuff which competes against products its subunits make.

You can have one IBM unit recommending/selling Cisco products which compete against more expensive IBM products by another IBM unit. You need some Sun stuff to work with some Microsoft stuff? IBM will say they'll do it.

From what I see, IBM is about providing choice, and helping customers make that choice for $$$$ :).

If there isn't much choice you don't need as much "consulting" and support. For example if your choices are: reinstall, or format and reinstall, I don't think you'll want to pay a lot.

Re:db2...

DB2 just doesn't scale down as well as some of the others so it doesn't get as much exposure to the masses, if you check out things like the TCP-H [tpc.org] results you'll notice at the 10TB level DB2 is #1 and #3, it's typically used for very large databases running on IBM big iron. It's yet another IBM technology that kind of sits in the corner running some of the largest financial systems in the world without getting a lot of exposure.

Re:Postgres clusters?

The subject of this article, EnterpriseDB, is trying to target this market with GridSQL [enterprisedb.com]. As it's new in it's current form, impossible to say how reliable systems built with it will be quite yet. Those looking for reasons behind the IBM investment might consider whether GridSQL might one day talk to DB2 databases as well.

The closest fully open-source PostgreSQL solution to your requirements that's been around a bit is pgpool-II [postgresql.org]. It think it's still too immature to be considered five-nines quality though, and there are some restrictions you have to observe. A PostgreSQL replication solution that is very robust and proven is slony [slony.info] but it's not a load-balancing solution in the way I suspect you want.

There's also the Greenplum Database [greenplum.com], which isn't free or open-source but is rooted in PostgreSQL technology.

Good enterprise-grade clustering with load-balancing is still on the PostgreSQL work in progress list rather than being here right now. I expect the core infrastructure piece needed to really make it work well (support for read-only warm-standby slaves) will make it into PostgreSQL 8.4 and be released around a year from now. I started a comparison page of the replication solutions currently available that's on the PostgreSQL wiki [postgresql.org] now that is trying to track progress in this area. Much like core PostgreSQL support for enabling replication, it still needs some work .