UML, PostgreSQL Get Corporate Support

tcopeland writes "An article on NewsForge highlights some changes in the upcoming PostgreSQL release (v7.5) that are funded by Fujitsu. PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus says that "Tablespaces, Nested Transactions, and Java support" are being underwritten by Fujitsu; this has also been mentioned on the postgresql-hackers list. He also says that 7.5 will be "...the most significant new release of the software since version 7.0 almost four years ago". Good times for PostgreSQL users!" And ggoebel writes "Jeff Dike posted a notice to the UML [User-mode Linux] developers mailing list: 'The first bit of news is that as of last Monday, I am working for Intel. They generously offered a full-time position, off-site, with my time mostly spent on UML. This basically means that UML is no longer a part-time, after-hours thing for me, so we should start seeing more work happening on it, especially compared to the last month or two.'"

That's all fine and dandy, but...

[Mr. Spontaneous]

'The first bit of news is that as of last Monday, I am working for Intel. They generously offered a full-time position, off-site, with my time mostly spent on UML. This basically means that UML is no longer a part-time, after-hours thing for me, so we should start seeing more work happening on it, especially compared to the last month or two.'

Will this mean that Intel might have a chance to influence its development? The true benefit of projects such as this is their independence from the big brother corporations who attempt to control the industry/market.

Solid stuff, that PostgreSQL...

[tcopeland]

...RubyForge [rubyforge.org] has been running on it for almost a year now, no problems.

Only a half million records and only about 75K queries a day, so it's not a huge DB... but it's definitely getting the job done.

Table spaces?

[AKAImBatman]

Does this mean that PostGreSQL will actually be able to write *directly* to disk cluster? That would be one serious performance boost! My only request is that they do us all a favor and make sure that we can fragment the tables across spaces. It tends to suck when one table fills an entire drive, and it refuses to use all the space on the other drives.

Re:UML is pretty awesome

[gtrubetskoy]

It's really the future of "shared" webhosting because it balances the power of a full server against the cost of a shared one.

I respecfully disagree. While UML gives you excellent isolation, it is an extremely inefficient way to virtualize your server since it does not take advantage (by design) of all the optimizations that UN*X provides. UML is great for kernel developers and applications where isolation is far more important than performance.

In Linux virtual server hosting, the future will be Linux VServer Project [linux-vserver.org]

(ok, I'm somewhat biased, I admit)

Re:That's all fine and dandy, but...

[jbolden]

Well obviously if they are funding development then they will have influence on what gets worked on. What political agenda do you see Intel as likely to have on advancing user mode? It would seem to me that this is fairly typical of Intel software devleopment for the last 15 years -- making sure that there is publically available code highlighting how to do cool things with their CPUs.

Re:UML

[timothy]

Lorcha --

You're right; I'd meant to parse the name and add in a link (as I now have done) to the project's web page.

timothy

OLAP still missing...

[zeux]

I'm really looking for an OLAP implementation on PostgreSQL... It's getting more an more important but it's still not there!

I made my company switch from SQL Server to PostgreSQL but now I have to export data every day from PostgreSQL to SQL Server just to get my OLAP reports!

As soon as OLAP is there I'll definitely get rid of SQL Server.

Postgres is kicking butt

[johnnyb]

and taking names. In addition to Fujitsu's additions, they are also doing point-in-time recovery. They have multiple replication solutions. It's an absolutely wonderful database to develop for.

It's got several really cool features, such as the ability to create your own index types, the ability to create your own column types, the ability to create rules for updating views, and a lot of other things that make it an absolute joy to work with.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it needs the ability to read bytea's as if they were BLOBs. Then life would be perfect!

From Fujitsu's pile, tablespaces is the most interesting feature I see - and that's actually pretty cool. That's one of the things that really allows you to realize the logical/physical separation that relational databases promise.

This rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm loading more than half a million records into a Postgres db on my iBook as I write this, and I gotta say that pgsql is cool as hell. The data type support alone (polygons?!?!) makes it worth the small amount of extra effort it takes to get it up and running.

Postgres flat blows away MySQL in every way I can thnk of except for the fact that one has to "manually" vacuum (cleanup + reindex) the db ... but that's what cron is for. The only things I miss from my MSSQL days is the ability to do on-the-fly data type changes on columns; this is actually a good thing because now I'm not so lazy about designing the db right in the first place. ;-)

If you're out there playing with MySQL or MSSQL, you owe it to yourself to give Postgres a shot.

Good news!

[rfernand79]

Certainly good news! :) PostgreSQL is a very robust and complete database, enjoyed by many academic users (mostly because of its excellent implementation of different SQL standards...) It's nice to hear that a company is backing them up now. UML and Intel, really cool, too. It's not as good as Linus/OSDL, but definitelly equivalent to the Linus/Transmeta years. So, in general, is this the road for the free world now? Backed up by powerful companies who also benefit? I certainly hope so.

Re:UML is pretty awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of "customers" out to cause problems. There are many that will take advantage of anything they can if it'll benefit them, regardless of how it affects the rest of the people using the server. I browsed some of the VServer hosts, and they all seemed more expensive than the UML host I have.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Same with ours.

Although recently one of our employees demo'd a "clone" (not of all the features, but enough to show it's real) of our system ported to PostgreSQL.

It's being considered for some new (possibly lower margin, so free is good) products in the product family.

The old "pgadmin II" tool had a useful migration tool, so other than stored procedures, the upgrade from MSsqlserver to PostgreSQL is supposedly quite smooth. That tool is still available [postgresql.org] but is hard to find because the newer pgadmin III doesn't (yet) have the migration feature.

Re:That's all fine and dandy, but...

[cleverhandle]

Loosen up that tinfoil hat, man. This is a pretty natural project for Intel to invest in. Improved User Mode Linux leads naturally to more shared servers, as others have detailed. And, in the interest of efficiency, those shared server operators will be interested in nice, juicy processors to allow more virtual servers on the same piece of physical hardware.

Sounds like a simple business investment to me - no need to search for conspiracies here.

Why corporate self-interest can be good for OSS

[j. andrew rogers]

There is more than just Fujitsu supporting PostgreSQL and the reasons there is corporate interest is pure unadulterated self-interest of the best kind.

Postgres is getting really close to the functionality and capabilities of the Big Commercial Enterprise DBMS, close enough that anyone can see that bridging that gap is quite doable. Most of the arguable weaknesses in Postgres are in the more esoteric high-end feature space, as it is already strong and quite feature complete for most routine RDBMS work. And the upcoming new version addresses a great many of those weaknesses. As the article said, this is going to be a major release.

The self-interest part is that it is a HELL OF A LOT CHEAPER for a corporation to pay people to add those last few features and bits that they want to Postgres than to pay an unholy amount of money to buy the required Oracle licenses. The Postgres engine is clean and fundamentally pretty good in an engineering sense, and so enterprise feature tweaks are relatively cheap. It is all about dollars and sense at the end of the day. Purchasing Postgres plus feature development is almost always going to be vastly cheaper than buying Oracle. And unlike Oracle, it is pretty much a one-time fixed cost. It is worth repeating that the engineering strength and scalability of the underlying Postgres platform is the primary reason the market is evolving this way. The gap between MySQL and high-end RDBMS is comparatively much too great for a company to fund closing that gap because a lot of additional arguably unrelated work may be required because of the internals. This increases time to delivery of features, increases the cost of adding high-end features, and increases the risk of problems.

If Oracle suddenly dropped its enterprise licensing costs by a couple of order of magnitude, then it would seriously threaten Postgres development. But since that is unlikely to happen, corporate money will continue to flow into making Postgres a formidable Oracle replacement, which it is already well on its way to being.

Re:This rules!

[tesmako]

Just having a polygon datatype is kinda cool in itself, but the fact that PostgreSQL really supports using R-tree indexes and thus make efficient geometric queries quickly and easily is really great.

PostgreSQL is probably the most well-polished and useful open source project there is (gcc being the runner up, I skip linux since there really are plenty of decent OSS alternatives to it). Good going PostgreSQL team!

GUI Tools

[Bilbo]

I just started using pgadmin3, and I have a feeling I have a way to go before I get really good at it. I could really use a migration tool since, as with the previous poster, we have a lot of SQL Server based applications I'd like to see moved to something like PostgreSQL.

Frankly, I still like the old TCL based "pgaccess". It was buggy as all get out, and really bogged down on larger databases, but it had some really nice tools such as the visual query designer.

The article mentions a couple of other GUI tools for accessing and maintaining PostgreSQL databases. Has anyone else used these, or are there other tools that people like?

postgre who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to make postgre's database like oracle's is definetly not the road to follow, more complexity and features (even tablespaces) don't make a better database, try to follow the simple and modular apporach of mysql and stop stuffing postgre unless you want to make it unbearable as Oracle, that on most common installations need a battalion of people to make it work descently.

Re:Good-Postgres and SQL Server

[randall_burns]

I'm a SQL Server DBA [outlander.com] and Python/Perl/Postgresql developer.

My sense is that it would be possible to extend Postgres to have a mode fully compatible with Oracle and/or Microsoft SQL Server. What this might mean is having SQL interpreters fully compatible with the quirks of Oracle and SQL Server-identical system tables available and identical libraries. I think Oracle will be the first target here because Oracle licensing fees are much higher than SQL Server--and parts of SQL Server are harder to re-engineer(i.e. DTS and some of the scheduling stuff).

Databases are a great Open Source target because scripts are open _and_ customers frequently control their data file format.

Re:OLAP still missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to make it in the OLAP or DSS world in a big way Postgres needs to get a parallel query engine. Tablespaces is a step in the right direction b/c it will allow increased I/O by making it easier to bring more physical devices into play. When you start doing this though you are gonna need to be able to throw more than one thread at each query which Postgres currently can't do to my understanding.

FYI I really love Postgres.

advanced features can be ignored

[brlewis]

apt-get install postgresql will work fine for most common installations. Once you've created your database there's really nothing simpler about mysql; PostgreSQL is simply more adhering to SQL92. There's very little reason to ever choose MySQL anymore.

Re:Table spaces?

[Just Some Guy]

By that you mean "Table Partitioning". That allows you to break up a single table across multiple storage devices.

For the uninitiated and lazy, is there any compelling reason why that's better than putting the database files on a RAID and letting the OS split the table across devices?

Re:what's the point?

[sumbry]

You've obviously never run a large database before. While a single RAID partition is fine for most uses, when you get into situations where you measure queries by how many are run per second then things really start to hit the fan.

Tablespaces allow you to do things like place a table that is 90 percent read and 10 percent write on one RAID array while taking another table that is maybe 50 percent write and 50 percent read on another table and then taking the Postgres WAL and placing that on a completely different array.

Table usage varies greatly across large databases. Some tables barely get touched, others get written to alot, others get read from alot.

I'm currently running a database where our peak loads are around 35 queries, per second. I've actually symlinked table locations to put my most heavily accessed tables on a seperate RAID array from the rest of my database. This gave me a 3 fold increase in speed. This is really noticed when we do things like VACUUM the db.