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one of the main reasons of this is Postgresql's lack of parallelism at the query level

Nonsense. Shilling is bad enough, but at least get your facts straight.

EnterpriseDB bundles a PL/SQL implementation that is advertised as compatible with Oracle's procedural SQL language (similar to ADA). This component is NOT open-source.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/compatibility-explained

IBM bundles the same PL/SQL emulation code in DB2.

I know you were joking around, but in some (many?) cases, the document store mode of Postgres is faster than a comparable MongoDB installation.

Here is one such study.

I didn't know about Mongres, thanks for sharing.

This is the EnterpriseDB blog post comparing performance of Pg and Mongo.

And yeah, hstore is old-school now that JSONB exists.

If I want Oracle PL/SQL in Postgres, I have to purchase EnterpriseDB. If you can get EnterpriseDB to give away the "deep Oracle compatibility" for free, many Oracle installations might switch. Let me know how that works out for you.

I'd also like to see PostgreSQL in the TPC-C top ten. That's a lot of work, and for people who need scalability, they don't have time to wait.

No idea. Hadn't seen XL before.

I saw that EnterpriseDB offered to support XC though. http://www.enterprisedb.com/se...

EnterpriseDB is an important part of PostgreSQL development with several contributors, but they still work within the larger development community of contributors. There are other companies with just as many contributors, with one example being how 2ndQuadrant is adding logical replication features.

One way you can tell if an open source project has a real community is whether the project would go on even if the largest company contributing code disappeared. Linux would survive RedHat disappearing, and PostgreSQL would certainly survive EDB going out of business. That's not even a theoretical question, because the PostgreSQL community is informed by having seen it happen once already. A company named Great Bridge hired a good percentage of the PostgreSQL community once, and then failed after running out of VC cash.

Have you actually looked at EnterpriseDB's executive list or board of directors? There's just as much CYA power there as there is with Oracle, probably more.

Have you actually looked at EnterpriseDB's executive list or board of directors? There's just as much CYA power there as there is with Oracle, probably more.

EntepriseDB has a compatibility layer that lets you drop an Oracle application on top of PostgreSQL and run it (nearly) unmodified.

See http://www.enterprisedb.com/solutions/oracle-compatibility-technology for more.

It's not me.. it's my boss!

For me, i would have switch to mysql^H^H^H^Hmariadb, postgresql, enterprisedb and one or more nosql and similar DBs, depending of required the usage. Oracle DB is good, but not that good to cost that much and with support getting worse and worse each year.

yet, my boss think its safer to pay a huge amount of money... it cost soo much, it must be good

Nice try... Troll all you want.

A number of large and important organizations are using PostgreSQL quite extensively for critical transaction processing:

http://www.postgresql.org/about/users/

And EnterpriseDB:

http://www.enterprisedb.com/success-stories/customers

It's not always the best fit, but it's very mature, and can handle most workloads you could want to use it for.

First of all, the argument against GPL is primarily a moral argument. GPL is a product of socialist thinking that completely misunderstands how the FLOSS marketplace works, and tries to use "intellectual property" laws (thereby legitimizing them) to hurt "evil corporations". GPL is a gun, and one that is becoming more and more dangerous with every version. It is hypocrisy to call restrictively-licensed software "free".

Secondly, you are wrong on the pragmatic side as well.

Read a bit of UNIX history, will ya? BSD was entangled in legal FUD at just the very time when Linux was taking off (1991 to mid-1994). By the time BSD became BSD-licensed, Linux was the buzzword of the year. This avalanche of attention was great enough to allow it to overcome its licensing handicap.

If your premise was correct, then we'd be seeing a trend of other permissively licensed (copyfree) projects being leapfrogged by restrictively licensed (copyleft) ones, but in reality it's the other way around. The smartest new projects tend to use permissive licenses instead!

The Apache license hasn't stopped Apache httpd from dominating all potential GPLed alternatives over the years, and now it has been supplanted by the even more permissively-licensed Nginx. We've seen popular scripting languages go from copyleft (Lisp, Perl, SpiderMonkey) to almost-copyfree (PHP, Python) to fully-copyfree (V8 / Node.JS, relicensed Ruby, Lua, Go, alternative PHP and Python implementations, etc). Mozilla has been leapfrogged by Chrome. MySQL is slowly beginning to lose market share to PostgreSQL, SQLite, and the various copyfree NoSQL alternatives.

GPL still dominates only among the software projects that were "grandfathered in" in the 1990s, when most people uncritically accepted GPL as "THE open source license". This includes the Linux kernel, mplayer, the popular widget toolkits, and things based on top of them. (The BSD people were geekier than the Linux people, and thus didn't rush to create things like GTK+.) The popularization of HTML5 with copyfree media codecs (and eventually HTML6+, with NaCl, etc) will help the copyfree world leapfrog in the latter two categories.

--libman

Where did you look? There is a binary installer available for Linux, Windows and MacOSX at http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/pgdownload

PostgreSQL also has providers of support contracts. I'm a little familiar with EnterpriseDB

It seems to me that HP would be better off sinking this money into contributions to PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB; it already offers a ton of Oracle compatibility, and runs on HP-UX: http://enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/products/postgres-plus-advanced-server/advanced-server-oracle-features

Dude, MySQL is probably considered dead to us. It is the same Oracle now (from business point of view), and just different label to hook customers.

Instead, we dumped Oracle and moved to PostgreSQL, despite of many MySQL promising forks around. Those, who needs professional and official support for PostgreSQL, might look around for variety of companies doing this. For example, http://www.enterprisedb.com/ etc.

I think he's talking about EnterpriseDB. They don't own PostgreSQL in any way, but Bruce Momjian and Dave Page, two of the top developers aside from Tom Lane, both work there. Ironically, their schtick is Oracle compatibility, complete with a compatible implementation of PL/SQL they call edbspl, date-format, data types, you name it. They've also contributed several modules and projects to the PostgreSQL project (GridSQL, several admin tools, etc).

Here is a good basis to start reading. For whatever reason, people forget there are numerous commercial PostgreSQL offerings. If you need to compete with Oracle on the high end, PostgreSQL absolutely has solutions, as do many other companies.

I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.

No, you're not listening, er reading. You don't make money by paying billions of dollars buying a company then dumping that company's products. Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit. Oracle is foolhardy doing so. Sure right now they're the 800 pound gorilla but there are other enterprise scale databases on the market. Microsoft will even help customers transition from Oracle to SQL Server. IBM has it's own offering, DB2 as does HP. Of course there are also open source based DBMSs such as ones based on PostgreSQL, Computer Associates spin-off Ingres, and Firebird.

Falcon

If you are using hand-rolled SQL, most MySQL queries will execute on Postgres without much modification. However, MSSQL will be vastly different.

For example, look at these ugly MSSQL queries with explicit locking, which you will probably have to use as developers and DBAs can't seem to agree on a standard isolation mechanism:

SELECT COUNT(UserID) FROM Users WITH (NOLOCK) WHERE Username LIKE 'foobar'

and

UPDATE Users WITH (ROWLOCK) SET Username = 'fred' WHERE Username = 'foobar'

Also, there is no LIMIT / OFFSET keywords in MSSQL, you have to do crazy shit like:

WITH results AS (
        SELECT
                rowNo = ROW_NUMBER() OVER( ORDER BY columnName ASC )
                , *
        FROM tableName
)
SELECT *
FROM results
WHERE rowNo between (@pageNumber-1)*@pageSize+1 and @pageNumber*@pageSize

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/187998/row-offset-in-ms-sql-server

You will soon realize that the Express version is super-limited (4GB max size, 1 GB ram, 1 core, no replication, etc.)
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/compare-features.aspx

Postgres is highly tunable, but the defaults (that ship with many OSes) are for small footprints. This is an older document, but still relevant with explanations and the annotated config guide (bottom of page). Throw 8 cores and 16GB ram at Postgres, tweak the conf a tiny bit, and the feature set and performance will surprise you.

Tune Postgres: http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/Tidbits/perf.html

There's no reason to use MSSQL unless all of your development and applications are on Windows, and your development team can't use anything other than their IDEs in a limited way. Once you start using Postgres, and realize the power behind it, you'll never want to use anything else.

If, for some strange reason, your company wants to spend money and buy DB support, go for a commercial vendor of postgres. Enterprise DB has some nice management features: http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/index.do

Enterprise DB implements a 95% or so solution to the oracle compatibility thing, including plsql.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/exposure/oracle-postgres_wp-1.do

1. Download the pre-built binary package from enterprisedb.com
2. Make the changes to /etc/sysctl.conf suggested by the installer (increased shared memory)
3. Reboot
4. Run the Postgresql installer again, letting it do its thing
5. Set the admin user/password in the nice installer GUI
6. Download and install pgadmin3 from pgadmin.org
7. Fire up pgadmin3 and pop in the username/password specified during the Postgres install
8. Create my users, databases, tables, etc. as desired

If this is too complex for you, I humbly submit MySQL may be too tough as well.

just give him PostgreSQL and bill him a nice fat "setup fee"

There are entire companies built around this idea.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/

There are a lot of "Oracle required" situations that can be serviced by http://www.enterprisedb.com/

They provide an implementation of PL/SQL for PostgreSQL with commercial support.

No I'm not kidding.

PostgreSQL does not support any of these, they are all add on.

EnterpriseDB supports slony... http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus/replication.do

How about EnterpriseDB?

I would rather get support for my database from an organization dedicated to the database support, rather than an IBM that might provide a DB2 support guy, along with half a dozen sales guys trying to tell you that you need other IBM products to go along with the DB2 database to really have the environment you need.

The subject of this article, EnterpriseDB, is trying to target this market with GridSQL. 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. 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 but it's not a load-balancing solution in the way I suspect you want.

There's also the Greenplum Database, 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 now that is trying to track progress in this area. Much like core PostgreSQL support for enabling replication, it still needs some work .

You should try out their admin tools - methinks they're pretty damned good.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus/administration.do

Yes, I would have expected them to buy EnterpriseDB which is an Oracle clone built on Postgres.

Yes, there are a few options.

Slony-I is a BSD licensed Master-Slave system; its successor, Slony-II, is still in development.

Various outfits like EnterpriseDB and Greenplum offer commercial Postgres derivatives with multi-master replication and clustering.

There are also open-source, less-popular options like PGPool and PGCluster.

Cheers,
-J

http://www.enterprisedb.com/

On one foot we have Oracle offering their linux flavor based on Redhat. If Redhat folds they are left with having to pick up where Redhat left off and move forward. I don't think Oracle is ready to put that kind of effort into something they wont actually own.

On the other foot, Redhat could start pushing alternate database solutions such as Postgresql. With commercial solutions available businesses may find that they don't need all of the features Oracle offers which not found in Postgresql.

I'll bet that when push comes to shove, Redhat could take some of Oracle's business.

If cost is a problem, there are definately alternatives like EnterpriseDB(http://www.enterprisedb.com/) that offer most of the same functionality.

The reality is, most applications don't need the power of Oracle, however, it seems that when they do, there really isn't a substitute.

I'm working on a possible joint project right now that will probably end up costing the involved companies several millions to complete and maintain. It will have a huge transaction rate, and need to be extremely robust. So as much as I cringe at the price tag, it is really the only db right now that I can suggest to everyone's VPs that has the track record and known capabilities.

As a 6 year Oracle DBA, all I have to say is that dealing with Oracle's patching is becoming a huge PITA to manage. At first, I was really worried when our management switched some of our servers to EnterpriseDB a few months ago because they don't as many features as Oracle, but I think a little differently about EnterpriseDB and PostgreSQL now. EnterpriseDB's support people kick ass and respond a helluva lot faster than any TAR I've entered into MetaLink and we haven't had to patch at all for security holes. The only patch we've done to EnterpriseDB was for a few additional Oracle compatibility features. If you have a small to medium Oracle app, consider getting EnterpriseDB or PostgreSQL instead... it will make your life as a DBA much easier. The only thing I wish was that EnterpriseDB had a MetaLink-type site for more information, but all in all MetaLink is a PITA to navigate and find stuff.

If they want something that plays nice with Oracle, they should take a look at http://www.enterprisedb.com/ .

One of the goals of the company is aimed specifically at making life easier for Oracle people on PostgreSQL.

Company I work for runs both PostgreSQL and Oracle. Years ago we were a PostgreSQL only shop. Along comes a Sr. Developer who touts Oracle to management, and they listened to him.

Now we have 2 Sr. Oracle DBAs, 1 Jr., and 2 PL/SQL programmers.

Oh yeah, we don't have any PostgreSQL DBAs. But we have just as many PostgreSQL servers.

Now we are moving some of our applications back to PostgreSQL, which of course scares the Oracle DBAs.

Our servers are heavy-hit. Thousands of queries per-second on both systems. PostgreSQL can keep up with Oracle, and Oracle can keep up with PostgreSQL.

One thing I've noticed about the market that is both good and bad for PostgreSQL - You can put out an Ad for an Oracle DBA and get hundreds of responces. Put one up for PostgreSQL and you get almost none. Almost a year we've had an Ad out for a PostgreSQL, there just arn't any.

And I don't think its because there arn't any full-time DBAs. The reality is PostgreSQL just doesn't need the same amount of staff that an equal amount of Oracle databases need. The good side, it just works and requires so little maintenence. The bad side? Its hard to sell to companies when they can't have someone full-time on it.

I'm curious with other companies experiences. How many full-time DBAs do you have for Oracle? How many for PostgreSQL?

Why does everything have to be all or nothing? There's nothing stopping an Oracle shop from using PostgreSQL here and there. Plus you've got EnterpriseDB, which bolts Oracle compatibility onto PostgreSQL for a little bit of the best of both worlds. Go ahead and pay Oracle for the top end of what their feature set lets you do and use PostgreSQL for the rest.

If you want to you can run your Oracle app on Enterprise DB (http://www.enterprisedb.com/) a commercially supported Postgresql based RDBMS with a fraction of the price of an Oracle license. Apparently "EnterpriseDB runs most applications written for Oracle unchanged".

Although I still think Opensource databases are the future it is nice to know there is a smooth migration path away from Oracle.

Also, is it legal to charge for EnterpriseDB in the way they do? They've made the price list a graphic so it cannot be easily quoted.

Note that they are restricting free use to 1 CPU, 4 GB of data, and 1 GB of memory. I believe there is a free version of Oracle that is similarly restricted.

EnterpriseDB is a variant of PostgreSQL that is "compatible with most Oracle applications".

How does it compare with Oracle? Is it really a clone in most features?

--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?

EnterpriseDB is a variant of PostgreSQL that is "compatible with most Oracle applications".

How does it compare with Oracle? Is it really a clone in most features?

--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?

The Postgresql Community is superb. I've received a huge amount of help in #postgresql on irc.freenode.net . I cannot say enough about them

EnterpriseDB (based on Postgresql) has a nice new logo too, which hints at something.....

Coincidence? I think not!

May the best RDBMS win.

A better bet about Oracle loosing marketshare is not MySQL, but EnterPriseDB (based on PostgreSQL) http://www.enterprisedb.com/ There's also Oracle compatibility modules for Ingres and even Firebird. Those will take on alot of SMB clients and MS SQL Server 2005 actually becoming a more mature enterprise product also challenges Oracle in the mid-sized database field.

There are already too many PostgreSQL players!

PostgreSQL
Pervasive
EnterpriseDB
and likely many more...

How do you want it to compare?

Source code quality is not easy to compare. At a first glance, MySQL is doing very good. They have this nice blurb about only having 1 defect in 4000 lines being more then 4 times better then with most commercial software. But if you dig deeper, you notice that PostgreSQL has been tested by the same company and only had 1 defect in every 39000 lines of code. Wow, so PostgreSQL must really be a lot better then MySQL.
But if you dig even deeper, you will find some explanation from a PostgreSQL developer and you remember what your mother told you about lies, damned lies and statistics.

You want to know about source code quality? Go read the source.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/

it's basically postgresql with an oracle compatibility layer.

they seem to be doing pretty well.

PostgreSQL has come a long way in 6-9 months. Please take a look at today's SLONY replication, at commercial support *and value-add* companies like http://www.commandprompt.com/, and http://www.enterprisedb.com/. Replication is here...don't worry. And by the way, sounds like EnterpriseDB is putting replication in place between Oracle and PostgreSQL...could be interesting...

PostgreSQL's support issues vs. MySQL's are simply because MySQL is a company, while PostgreSQL is a community. The good news, though, is that there are some very capable commercial support organizations, including (in alphabetical order), http://www.commandprompt.com/, http://www.enterprisedb.com/, and http://www.pervasive.com/.

...but some folks believe you've gotta pay money or the app isn't any good.

There are good reasons to pay someone for support, if the people you're paying know their stuff. If you're building enterprise level, mission critical data warehouses, you'll want immediate access to expert help when things go horribly wrong. And Sorbannes/Oxley reinforces that need.

For those seeking paid support, there are several companies working to do interesting things with Pg:

• GreenPlum also working to enhance Pg with the Bizgress project
• EnterpriseDB - working to make Pg interoperable w/ Oracle tools
• Netezza - MPP appliance h/w running a modded version of Pg

There are some other outfits dedicated to Pg support, but I can't recall the particulars...

Meanwhile, MySQL still seems to be having difficulty getting stored procs and real views released...5.0 is starting to make Longhorn's development schedule look like a quarterly maintenance release.

It's also interesting that TFA didn't mention the rise of alternatives ranging from SQLite (which pretty much does everything that folks used MySQL for in the first place, but wo/ any license confusion), to Firebird, to the recently open'd Ingres.