Sorry you took it that way. Look, what Great Bridge did was buy the same commercial implementation of industry standard benchmarks (AS3AP and TPC-C) that all the trade mags use. Then we hired a company to run the tests on identical hardware configurations. Then we shared the results with the community.
Here's what we didn't do: write our own benchmarks, write our own drivers. We deliberately used the latest shipping/stable version of each product (which is why we didn't use 3.23 for MySQL). We used ODBC, as others have well explained, because it's the only way 3 of the 5 databases (Postgres, MySQL, Interbase) could connect to this benchmark software.
We think that's about as close to an apples to apples comparison as you can get without a fully open source implementation of these established benchmarks (which is a long-term goal of ours).
We paid for the test. Xperts worked as a contractor to Great Bridge.
Look, this isn't vendor FUD. This is an open source company sharing its research with the open source community. Feel free to ignore the results if you find them somehow tainted. Our hope is that by releasing our findings, others will try the same tests.
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
We also ran the same tests on Interbase 5.6 for Linux. The 6.0 release showed some very modest improvement over the 5.6 results (even with the ODBC hack), so that's what we reported in the press release. When and if there is an open source ODBC driver for Interbase 6 (or even a finished closed one), we'll re-run the tests.
One would think that would be an environment in which MySQL would shine. But the results are actually not out of line with an earlier test run by PC Week.
Will Great Bridge change anything? The web site looks interesting. I think it looks that way because they hired a graphic designer and some marketing folks. Otherwise, it's just a prop for a fund-raising road show....
Gosh, thanks - that's actually just a placeholder site, with the graphics from our corporate parent. New one will be up in a week or so.
As for the fund-raising, we're fully funded, so no worries there. To your question, yes, we absolutely will be working with the Postgres community to improve the docs.
Regards, Ned Lilly VP Hacker Relations Great Bridge
The AC makes a valid point about TPC tests. For the past few months, we've been building a lab which is, as we speak, running the TPC-C and TPC-D tests, as well as the AS3AP tests - pitting Postgres against other RDBMS products, both open and proprietary.
I think the results will surprise a lot of people.
Once we're done with the tests, we'll then look to get them duplicated and certified by outside parties in the press as well as TPC itself.
One fun little factoid we discovered: Some proprietary vendors include a little provision in your software license that forbids you from releasing benchmark information naming their product without their permission. I hereby promise a veritable public relations carnival to highlight that fact.
Wow, we're happy to see the response to the initial announcements. I'm Ned Lilly, one of the four employees mentioned in the CNET/Yahoo article. Wanted to say hey, and try and answer some of the questions I've seen so far. Pls feel free to email me directly too- ned@greatbridge.com.
1) PostgreSQL Features. We took about six months to study the open-source world, and have spent a lot of time testing, benchmarking, reviewing code, etc., and in our opinion, PostgreSQL 7.0 is by far the best choice among open-source databases. My personal impression is that some people might have bad memories of earlier versions (I myself actually used it in an earlier business but had to throw it away), but the improvements leading up to 6.5.x and now 7.0 are incredible. And, of course, 7.1 is going be even better:) I'd defer any specific questions about features to the Postgres developers themselves (http://www.postgresql.org/devel-contrib.html) - they're still running the development effort, and will continue to do so.
2) MySQL & Interbase. So that begs the question, what about other open-source databases. Don't want to start a flame-a-thon here, I'll just say that we think MySQL lacks a lot of desirable features (this topic's been exhaustively debated elsewhere), and Interbase, while it might be a good commercial product, isn't yet open-source. To my knowledge, they haven't released the source for 6.0 yet (only binaries), and it's a fair question whether you can create a robust open-source community instantaneously. PostgreSQL has been open-source for many years, and the current core steering group has done a great job at making the code base clean, uniform, and accessible to other hackers.
3) Our Customers. So who are our customers? There's been some good discussion here on that topic already. The short answer is, we've got some ideas, but we're being fairly deliberate in how we verify those ideas. We've done some pretty comprehensive market research on different sectors of the IT world, including 32 focus groups in four U.S. cities, and we think we'll be able to put PostgreSQL (and other open-source tools) in the hands of the people who will best be able to use them. We don't really want to talk in too much detail about our business model at this point - frankly, we're still refining it based on the potential customer feedback we're getting from this research. That process is how Landmark Communications (the parent company) went about building The Weather Channel cable network from scratch, and we think it can set us apart from some of the other open source companies in the market today.
4) BSD vs GPL. More potential flame-bait here, so read carefully...:) Another area we spent a lot of time researching was the area of open source licensing. We like the Berkeley/BSD-style license under which PostgreSQL is now offered; we think it's the simplest to understand (it's free for any use, with no restrictions on what you can do with the code), and offers the fewest barriers to widespread commercial adoption. We've heard from a lot of business types that a GPL-style license scares them when it's touching their proprietary business applications. You might wonder if we're just going to freeload on all the community development work, then take the code, call it GreatBridgeSQL, and fork it off into some proprietary product. That would be the stupidest thing we could possibly do - we are 100% bought into the open source development model, and have no intention of ruining what is working so well. Indeed, we're going to do quite a bit of internal development ourselves - on interfaces, APIs, monitoring tools, and business applications - and everything we write, we're going to throw back over the fence into open source for the community to bang on and improve. We'll do the same to other peoples' code - just like any other member of the community.
5) Business Plans. Some of the press reports have talked about a potential IPO, and people have rightly sniffed and said, yeah right. Let me be perfectly clear on this one: Landmark Communications, which is a 100-year old privately held company, doesn't build companies to do a quick public offering spin-out. The Weather Channel, and weather.com (which has 14 million unique users a month), are both privately held. Great Bridge's CEO, Al Ritter, is the former CFO of Landmark corporate, and is deeply steeped in the old-fashioned notion that companies should probably try and be profitable rather than just ask for more and more public money. We have no intention of going down the IPO road until we're satisfied that we've built a business that can stand on its own two feet, generating real live profits by delivering professional support for open source software solutions. We think, frankly, that a lot of tech support (particularly in the database arena) stinks - and we can do better. We think we've got a good product to get behind in Postgres. And if at some point down the road we think there's an opportunity to super-charge the business through an IPO, we might well do it. But unlike a lot of startups, we don't need the money. Landmark's committed $25 million to this phase of the rollout, and if we can make the case to our corporate bosses for another round of investment, there's more where that came from.
6) Hiring. Yup, we're hiring. We want developers, support engineers, even, er... marketing people. We're talking with a lot of people in the PostgreSQL world already, and will be making some more announcements on that front in the weeks to come. If you're interested, please email me at ned@greatbridge.com.
Slashdot Mirror
The link you included to IBM returns a 404. Got another one?
Er... I really can't comment, other than to say that it's not IBM, Informix, or Sybase ...
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
Sorry you took it that way. Look, what Great Bridge did was buy the same commercial implementation of industry standard benchmarks (AS3AP and TPC-C) that all the trade mags use. Then we hired a company to run the tests on identical hardware configurations. Then we shared the results with the community.
Here's what we didn't do: write our own benchmarks, write our own drivers. We deliberately used the latest shipping/stable version of each product (which is why we didn't use 3.23 for MySQL). We used ODBC, as others have well explained, because it's the only way 3 of the 5 databases (Postgres, MySQL, Interbase) could connect to this benchmark software.
We think that's about as close to an apples to apples comparison as you can get without a fully open source implementation of these established benchmarks (which is a long-term goal of ours).
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
We paid for the test. Xperts worked as a contractor to Great Bridge. Look, this isn't vendor FUD. This is an open source company sharing its research with the open source community. Feel free to ignore the results if you find them somehow tainted. Our hope is that by releasing our findings, others will try the same tests. Regards, Ned Lilly VP Hacker Relations Great Bridge
We also ran the same tests on Interbase 5.6 for Linux. The 6.0 release showed some very modest improvement over the 5.6 results (even with the ODBC hack), so that's what we reported in the press release. When and if there is an open source ODBC driver for Interbase 6 (or even a finished closed one), we'll re-run the tests.
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
Huh? We're not affiliated in any way with Mindcraft.
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP, Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
Actually, the AS3AP test that was run was the IR (information retrieval) test, just quick reads. See http://www.benchmarkresources.c om/handbook/5-3.html.
One would think that would be an environment in which MySQL would shine. But the results are actually not out of line with an earlier test run by PC Week.
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
Gosh, thanks - that's actually just a placeholder site, with the graphics from our corporate parent. New one will be up in a week or so.
As for the fund-raising, we're fully funded, so no worries there. To your question, yes, we absolutely will be working with the Postgres community to improve the docs.
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
DOH! Sorry, try again, our Web host did something very bad they shouldn't have.
:)
Those responsible have been sacked
Free T-shirt offer still applies for all Postgres users who complete the survey.
thanks,
Ned Lilly
VP Hacker Relations
Great Bridge
I think the results will surprise a lot of people.
Once we're done with the tests, we'll then look to get them duplicated and certified by outside parties in the press as well as TPC itself.
One fun little factoid we discovered: Some proprietary vendors include a little provision in your software license that forbids you from releasing benchmark information naming their product without their permission. I hereby promise a veritable public relations carnival to highlight that fact.
Regards,
Ned Lilly
VP, Hacker Relations
Wow, we're happy to see the response to the initial announcements. I'm Ned Lilly, one of the four employees mentioned in the CNET/Yahoo article. Wanted to say hey, and try and answer some of the questions I've seen so far. Pls feel free to email me directly too- ned@greatbridge.com.
1) PostgreSQL Features. We took about six months to study the open-source world, and have spent a lot of time testing, benchmarking, reviewing code, etc., and in our opinion, PostgreSQL 7.0 is by far the best choice among open-source databases. My personal impression is that some people might have bad memories of earlier versions (I myself actually used it in an earlier business but had to throw it away), but the improvements leading up to 6.5.x and now 7.0 are incredible. And, of course, 7.1 is going be even better :) I'd defer any specific questions about features to the Postgres developers themselves (http://www.postgresql.org/devel-contrib.html) - they're still running the development effort, and will continue to do so.
2) MySQL & Interbase. So that begs the question, what about other open-source databases. Don't want to start a flame-a-thon here, I'll just say that we think MySQL lacks a lot of desirable features (this topic's been exhaustively debated elsewhere), and Interbase, while it might be a good commercial product, isn't yet open-source. To my knowledge, they haven't released the source for 6.0 yet (only binaries), and it's a fair question whether you can create a robust open-source community instantaneously. PostgreSQL has been open-source for many years, and the current core steering group has done a great job at making the code base clean, uniform, and accessible to other hackers.
3) Our Customers. So who are our customers? There's been some good discussion here on that topic already. The short answer is, we've got some ideas, but we're being fairly deliberate in how we verify those ideas. We've done some pretty comprehensive market research on different sectors of the IT world, including 32 focus groups in four U.S. cities, and we think we'll be able to put PostgreSQL (and other open-source tools) in the hands of the people who will best be able to use them. We don't really want to talk in too much detail about our business model at this point - frankly, we're still refining it based on the potential customer feedback we're getting from this research. That process is how Landmark Communications (the parent company) went about building The Weather Channel cable network from scratch, and we think it can set us apart from some of the other open source companies in the market today.
4) BSD vs GPL. More potential flame-bait here, so read carefully... :) Another area we spent a lot of time researching was the area of open source licensing. We like the Berkeley/BSD-style license under which PostgreSQL is now offered; we think it's the simplest to understand (it's free for any use, with no restrictions on what you can do with the code), and offers the fewest barriers to widespread commercial adoption. We've heard from a lot of business types that a GPL-style license scares them when it's touching their proprietary business applications. You might wonder if we're just going to freeload on all the community development work, then take the code, call it GreatBridgeSQL, and fork it off into some proprietary product. That would be the stupidest thing we could possibly do - we are 100% bought into the open source development model, and have no intention of ruining what is working so well. Indeed, we're going to do quite a bit of internal development ourselves - on interfaces, APIs, monitoring tools, and business applications - and everything we write, we're going to throw back over the fence into open source for the community to bang on and improve. We'll do the same to other peoples' code - just like any other member of the community.
5) Business Plans. Some of the press reports have talked about a potential IPO, and people have rightly sniffed and said, yeah right. Let me be perfectly clear on this one: Landmark Communications, which is a 100-year old privately held company, doesn't build companies to do a quick public offering spin-out. The Weather Channel, and weather.com (which has 14 million unique users a month), are both privately held. Great Bridge's CEO, Al Ritter, is the former CFO of Landmark corporate, and is deeply steeped in the old-fashioned notion that companies should probably try and be profitable rather than just ask for more and more public money. We have no intention of going down the IPO road until we're satisfied that we've built a business that can stand on its own two feet, generating real live profits by delivering professional support for open source software solutions. We think, frankly, that a lot of tech support (particularly in the database arena) stinks - and we can do better. We think we've got a good product to get behind in Postgres. And if at some point down the road we think there's an opportunity to super-charge the business through an IPO, we might well do it. But unlike a lot of startups, we don't need the money. Landmark's committed $25 million to this phase of the rollout, and if we can make the case to our corporate bosses for another round of investment, there's more where that came from.
6) Hiring. Yup, we're hiring. We want developers, support engineers, even, er... marketing people. We're talking with a lot of people in the PostgreSQL world already, and will be making some more announcements on that front in the weeks to come. If you're interested, please email me at ned@greatbridge.com.
Thanks...
Ned