OR Technologies - Making Business Intelligence Work! http://ortechnologies.net Making Business Intelligence Work! Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:01:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 en hourly 1 Postgres Plus and GridSQL http://ortechnologies.net/postgres-plus-and-gridsql/ http://ortechnologies.net/postgres-plus-and-gridsql/#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:14:09 +0000 ORTech http://www.ortechnologies.net/main/?p=57 For the last 5 years, I’ve been harassing all of the commercial PostgreSQL vendors — including the one I work for — to put together a serious PostgreSQL “distribution”, with a set of tools, installers and GUIs appropriate to the new user and competitive with the massive packages delivered by Microsoft and Oracle. You see, PostgreSQL distributes on a “kernel” model, meaning that the 13mb download you get from www.postgresql.org is just the core database engine and essential tools. It lacks a GUI, drivers, replication tools, developer tools or system administration plugins, and is no more meant to be used on its own than the Linux kernel is. In other words, PostgreSQL has historically been the Slackware of databases, and it’s time for us to get gussied up and go Red Hat or Ubuntu to compete with the big proprietary software.

EnterpriseDB, if their press is to be believed, has finally done that. It’s about time someone did, and I’m glad they’re leading the way. Hopefully this will set a competitive trend for other PostgreSQL products companies.

EnterpriseDB’s new open source “Postgres Plus” includes, bundled, integrated and ready to go: PostgreSQL 8.3.1, pgAdmin 1.8.2, PostGIS 1.3.2, GEOS 3.0.0, Slony-I 1.2.13, PgBouncer 1.1.2, memcached 1.2.5, pgmemcache 1.1, GridSQL 0.9, JDBC 8.3, ODBC 8.3, phpPgAdmin 4.1.3 (with PHP & Apache), npgsql, PL/pgSQL debugger, and MySQL to PostgreSQL migrator. And this with an installer which covers 5 Linuxes, Windows and Mac. It also includes something called “quick starts” for common OSS application platforms like Rails and Drupal.

The second reason I’m excited is buried in the middle of that bundle, called GridSQL. Before EnterpriseDB purchased it, GridSQL used to be a lightweight parallel query architecture called ExtenDB. ExtenDB was a decent and relatively polished simple parallel query system: a lot like PostgresForest or pgPool2, only more user-friendly. But they came to market at the same time as Greenplum, and who wants to buy the lightweight parallel query when you can get the whole scales-to-1000TB schmear?

As an open-source technology, though, and optimized for OTLP workloads with core PostgreSQL, GridSQL has a very strong use case in supporting the kind of combination OLTP/DSS applications which are the core of Oracle’s customer base. It was exactly the right move to make PostgreSQL more competitive, and my hat’s off to EnterpriseDB for being bold enough to do it. The only thing which would be better is if they could BSD it, so it’d be a candidate for including in postgresql.org distributions. EnterpriseDB has told me, though, that they will be collecting copyright assignments from any contributors so that they can eventually BSD it, maybe when the competitive picture has changed.

So, thanks EnterpriseDB — for continuing to push PostgreSQL forwards.

Oh, and the IBM investment? No, I’m not going to speculate about that.

]]> http://ortechnologies.net/postgres-plus-and-gridsql/feed/ PostgreSQL Conference East 2008! http://ortechnologies.net/postgresql-conference-east-2008/ http://ortechnologies.net/postgresql-conference-east-2008/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:34:36 +0000 ORTech http://www.ortechnologies.net/main/?p=29 PostgreSQL Conference 2008

PostgreSQL Conference 2008

The pre-eminent PostgreSQL Community Conference will be held on March 29th and 30th. Two days of Talks, Mini-Tutorials, Tutorials and community!

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