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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.'"
Question: how do you properly pronounce "PostgreSQL"?
Now there's an oxymoron!
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, technically speaking. By the time you enable all the atomicity, and PostgreSQL feature set, you arrive at worse-than PostgreSQL performance.
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, legally speaking. PostgreSQL is BSD. MySQL is anything but. Sure, the community edition is free, but it cannot be used with commercial software. In fact, there's a special "open source exception" to the license. That's not really open source. Open Source would never make you pay server licensing fees for use in commercial software, it would only make you distribute your source at worst.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Here's a few random thoughts:
Having recently seen Sun buy MySQL, this looks a lot like a "me too"-move. That's not to say that it doesn't make business sense.
Last I checked, IBM makes its money from two things: hardware and support. Note that software is not one of them; the software is (to them) merely what enables them to sell their bread and butter. It's also costing them money to develop and maintain software that drives sales.
That's why they've invested money in Linux, and that's why they're investing money in Postgres: offering software with a good track record and a good reputation drives sales better, and cost is driven down as the software is open source.
Can one tell me why we (in the open source world), do not have a single product that competes with Access in terms of functionality, ease of use and ease of programming business logic?
Yeah, if I'm the owner of a company and not just some "Slash and Burn" CEO, I wouldn't want to have my core assets hostage to some third party _company_.
Having it in the hands of a trusted _person_ is different. If that person works for a different company, it's harder to ensure it's always that same trusted person who manages it.
Whereas if that trusted person works for you and the assets are in your company, it's a bit easier eh?
DB2 just doesn't scale down as well as some of the others so it doesn't get as much exposure to the masses, if you check out things like the TCP-H results you'll notice at the 10TB level DB2 is #1 and #3, it's typically used for very large databases running on IBM big iron. It's yet another IBM technology that kind of sits in the corner running some of the largest financial systems in the world without getting a lot of exposure.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I asked my local IBM sales representive since they now sell PostgreSQL, and he gave the pronunciation in the subject line.
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.