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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.'"
It's really the future of "shared" webhosting because it balances the power of a full server against the cost of a shared one. Some hosts like JVDS and RimuHosting are already doing this and it's great.
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.
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
UML ....
(1) Unified Modeling Language?
or (2) User Mode Linux?
Methinks (2), given that I work alot with (1) and have never heard of Jeff Dike
...RubyForge 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.
The Army reading list
This basically means that UML is no longer a part-time, after-hours thing for me
You have my deepest sympathy.
Oh, you meant User-mode Linux? Well, why didn't you say so? Sometimes I think these writeups are intentionally confusing.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I suspect a lot of people here are. To me, and probably to most of them, UML is Unified Modelling Language. Hell, do a google search for UML and the top hit is to the UML website.
I know it's too much to ask OSS projects not to pick confusing acronyms and names, but I'd like to think that story submitters or at least editors could a little clearer.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
the primary DB System for so long has been MySQL. PHP coders don't have too much for an alternative
Au contraire, there are PHP interfaces for PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, and MSSQL built right in to the source distribution. I seem to recall that back in the Bad Old Days before Mac OS X, when you had to compile things yourself, building PHP with all the necessary libraries was a huge pain, but now it's a trivial thing. Marc Liyanage maintains a PHP module package that snaps right into the built-in Apache web server on your Mac, and it already has most of the necessary bells and whistles built in.
I write in my journal
the primary DB System for so long has been MySQL.
Care to qualify that statement? Ever hear of Oracle? Or DB2 or SQL Server or Sybase or...?
...some on PGFoundry, some still on GBorg.
PLUG: For example, there's this little SQL query analysis utility!
The Army reading list
Also this is consistent with the Open Source Paradigm. Where it is in the interests of companies to improve the software, and the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of them not being exclusive. It is this philosophy, in my opinion, that will beat proprietary software models such as Microsoft, and it is these companies that are key in stopping those who want to halt the advancments of FOSS using idiotic patents and other invalid IP arguments.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
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.
Iraq: war to save the U
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.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
... 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. ;-)
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
If you're out there playing with MySQL or MSSQL, you owe it to yourself to give Postgres a shot.
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.
...can be found on the Big List Of GForge Sites.
Props to Tim Perdue for picking a solid database on which to build GForge!
The Army reading list
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 but is hard to find because the newer pgadmin III doesn't (yet) have the migration feature.
...If you want to manage a lot of UML virtual machines, I _highly_ recommend UMLazi. It has a very slick configuration file format-- configuration directories instead of a single file, which makes it really easy to manipulate with scripts--, and they've obviously put a lot of thought into security.
I had a few problems getting it started, but the developers were very helpful.
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.
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?
Your Servant, B. Baggins
7.5 will contain a native windows port with no external dependencies. You can find the current binary version here.
Even though it is currently in beta it works very well. The port is now being downloaded over 2000 times a week and increasing all the time.
Looks like version 7.5 will also include a native Windows port. Prior to this, PostgreSQL on Windows has always required Cygwin (which offers a lot of great stuff in and of itself) to run.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I'm a SQL Server DBA 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.
Jeff Dike started user-mode linux in February 1998
message from jeff
Unified Modelling Language may have existed in early 1998; I first saw it in April 1999. But Unified Modelling Language was a lot smaller back then.
And Google did not exist in February 1998!
These days, when I need to name something, I stick the name in google and check for conflicts.
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.
Rumbaugh, Booch, and Jacobsen started on UML in the mid 90s.
According to this, UML 0.9 was from 1996, UML 1.0 was 1997.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Desipite this being moderated offtopic, I found this to be true myself.
I suspect there are more system administrators reading slashdot than programmers.
So if you are being paid to program and you want to work with PostgreSQL, your best bet is to talk your current employer to switch.
That is because almost no one is hiring programmers for PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Or you can keep using Oracle or MSSQL and put marketable skills on your resume.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
I've used the OLAP stuff on SQL Server, and I honestly didn't find it much help. From what I saw, it was practically a *report writer* front-end on top of the underlying database--not nearly enough power for the problems my company has.
True OLAP often involves many layers of analysis, with many steps of processing. I had hoped that SQL Server OLAP would help manage all that, but it doesn't do enough. To be fair, there are some nice tools to graphically create what amouont to some stored procedures, but after a while, an experienced SQL developer will just revert to lots and lots of stored procedures chained together in a job that runs on a regular basis. Consequently, all that mysterious logic about *how* a number in the middle of an OLAP report came to be calculated is still stored in a procedure that can't easily be modified. OLAP in SQL Server gives the illusion that analysis is easy, but, alas, it is not.
I'd be curious to hear from others who have used SQL Server's OLAP and other tools like Cognos, Oracle, or Siebel, etc. What OLAP features *should* PostgreSQL adopt?
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.