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.'"

EnterpriseDB also has Cloud Database service

[1sockchuck]

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:geeks want to do it right

[totally bogus dude]

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.)

Re:Still waiting for a decent GUI

[ashridah]

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.

PostgreSQL ROCKS

[mcrbids]

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:db2...

[firefly4f4]

I believe DB2 manages more data than Oracle, whereas Oracle has more installations. Disclaimer: I work for IBM. The thoughts posted are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of IBM.

Re:EnterpriseDB also has Cloud Database service

[totally bogus dude]

Akamai don't generally host the data, they just mirror it. Although they are the public face of your site and therefore you need to trust them, if you do start to get nervous about them you can just adjust your DNS so nobody uses their servers -- you're still in control of the first link in the chain, and you're still the original source of the content.

Having your data on Amazon's servers is more like having your email in a Gmail account. The best you can do is frequently back it up so you have a local copy, but since it's the live data you're always going to be slightly behind, and if the company hosting it decides to deny you access to it for some reason (legal, technical, bullying, incompetence) you're pretty much screwed until you can get the courts to force them to give you access to your data.

Another difference is that Akamai are caching data which is intended to be public (or at least semi-public), which may not be the case with a hosted database app. If you've got private data you won't be putting it on your website for Akamai to cache in the first place, and if you have a secure "members only" area there's a good chance that content will only be on your own servers, and not served by Akamai. But if all of your data (both public and private) is on someone else's servers, then you're trusting them to a) keep it secure and b) respect your privacy.

Re:Postgres clusters?

[greg1104]

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 .

Re:Still waiting for a decent GUI

[fatp]

I basically agree with your comment. Actually, I did a lot of search recently for application builder (which run on windows) for PostgreSQL and have the following findings:

1) OpenOffice.org: Very poor scripting ability... wait for 3.0
2) pgaccess: Access for PostgreSQL. Looked promising, with Form Editor, Report Editor etc & scripting with TCL. But the project is dead and website is recycled.
3) bond (http://www.treshna.com/bond/ [treshna.com]): Looked interesting but I could not run the windows version... never tried linux version :P
4) rekall, knoda: both are database frontends for KDE. Looked interesting. I hope they will come with KDE on windows

Also, if your objective is to find something free (as beer), and have plenty of resources, you can have a look on Oracle XE+Application Express. Looks a bit strange at first (with a non-WYSIWYG form builder), but much better after one understand its design concept.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

[Ed Avis]

I think the EnterpriseDB extensions are for companies currently using Oracle who want a cheaper alternative. They do not affect the core Postgres development.

Note that MySQL AB is also free to distribute proprietary extensions to MySQL, since they own the copyright. And this is much more likely to affect MySQL core development, since you have the same company maintaining the free version and trying to sell proprietary addons.

Re:MySQL license clarification: free as in freedom

[TheSunborn]

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.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

[asc99c]

MySQL is a database that is very well suited to running a web application. That's why. Many web apps are generally going to have many more reads than writes. Additionally, the writes tend to be pretty simple and not require complex locking mechanisms.

E.g. my photos website uses gallery2 which works easiest on the LAMP stack. The main database queries are simple - what albums are there, does the user have permission to see them, what photos are in this album etc. The updates are similarly easy - add a new album, add a new photo, add a new user. For this, MySQL is perfect, simple and fast.

However once you start writing more complex systems with tougher constraints things become a lot harder. Typically, you have a record in a state that needs notifying to another system. You need to read that record, send a message to the other system and then modify that record to say the message is sent and the other system then has control over it. For this you need the various locking mechanisms and guarantees from the database or the two systems get out of line. MySQL just isn't the database to use for that sort of application.

Re:PostgreSQL ROCKS

[tuxbond]

I've never understood why the "MySQL" buzzzzzz everywhere. PostgreSQL has been a __real__ DBMS from its beginning. It had support for really huge tables and it has an ingenious way to work around the 2GB file size limit on the old file systems.

The replication is its weakest point (it was non-existent for a while). The commercial and free packages to bring replication to PostgreSQL were sometime good and others don't. Many projects started it but were down or dorman in a year or so. Hopefully new efforts will finally bring that feature with the same rock solid standing as the other PostgreSQL features.

Happy to see IBM around!

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

[eric2hill]

Now that PostgreSQL properly (native binaries vs Cygwin and fast/east installation) supports Windows, only a fool would use PostgreSQL for new projects.

Did you mean MySQL? :)

Re:Anyone working on a modern comparison?

[greg1104]

Why PostgreSQL Instead of MySQL: Comparing Reliability and Speed in 2007 [postgresql.org]

I'll have a 2008 update out soon now that PostgreSQL 8.3 has been released.

Re:MySQL databae supremacy

[smellotron]

MySQL might be the right answer, as long as you don't need to use more sofisticated stuff, like triggers or transactions.

Or complex joins, multi-level joins, or functions that return recordsets (essentially "efficiently-parametrized views"). My last attempt at creating views within views resulted in a LEFT OUTER JOIN somehow transforming itself into an INNER JOIN, forcing me to "inline" the entire SQL query into a single view. Oh yeah, and the performance wasn't so great, and the MySQL "query explanation" capabilities suck, so I had a much harder time improving said performance.