EnterpriseDB is making a series of moves and announcements. Highlights include:

• Renaming/repositioning the product as ?Postgres Plus.? The free product is now Postgres Plus, while the version you pay EnterpriseDB for is now Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
• Repackaging the products, so that Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a strict superset of Postgres Plus.
• New features added to Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
• Features newly migrated from Advanced Server down to Postgres Plus.
• A strategic investment by IBM.
• Stressing Postgres in EnterpriseDB marketing, and dropping the tag-line defining themselves as ?the Oracle-compatible database company.?

So far as I can tell, most of the technical differences between Advanced Server and regular Postgres Plus lie in three areas:

• Oracle compatibility
• Automated tuning, under the name Dynatune
• Transaction-timing performance features, such as bulk load and bulk commit

Significant technology in Postgres Plus ? much of which was previously available in EnterpriseDB Advanced Server — includes:

• Automated installation tuning
• GridSQL ? lightweight MPP data warehousing, originally acquired via the small acquisition of ExtenDB
• Outside-the-DBMS memcache, which now works on an automatic least-recently-used basis just as one would expect it to.

And, to my great joy — somewhere in the product line (I’m not sure where) is MySQL compatibility.

One obvious question comes to mind: ?Why wasn’t the free version always just a subset of Advanced Server?? The answer is that the free/open source version was getting its patches quickly ? i.e., right in line with PostgreSQL — while the chargeable enterprise version was being held back for testing. EnterpriseDB estimates the time lag in that at roughly six months or so. To get the products’ schedules aligned, EnterpriseDB now seems to be splitting the difference, with Postgres Plus getting patches somewhat more slowly than PostgreSQL, and Advanced Server’s testing cycle being shorter than it used to be.

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