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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.'"
...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.
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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 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
(ok, I'm somewhat biased, I admit)
The true benefit of projects such as this is their independence from the big brother corporations
You mean like Sun and HP funding the Apache group?
Or Novell and Ximian underwriting the Mono Project?
Or IBM contributing to F/OSS?
Do you think these and other projects would be where they are today without the backing of serious money/resources?
Sigs cause cancer.
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.
...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.