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Content Tagged with DBMS + mid-range

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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Technorati Tags: Postgres

I finally caught up with Bob Zurek about EnterpriseDB’s foray into the Elastra cloud. Here are some highlights:

• There have been dozens of applicants for the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta program. As is usual in limited beta programs, EnterpriseDB is trying to sort out the ones who’ll make a big commitment from the tire-kickers.
• The main interest in EnterpriseDB/Elastra has come from ISVs, and secondarily from purely online businesses (e.g., SaaS vendors, web businesses, and a large MMO game vendors). There’s been a little interest from enterprises.
• Significant fractions of the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta applications come from each of the Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL user communities. A few come from SQL Server. None come from DB2.
• Bob praised Elastra for its technology in clustering, starting/stopping instances, etc. He also said that EnterpriseDB had “educated” Elastra on EnterpriseDB internals and/or admin tools, to make the integration work.
• EnterpriseDB will start turning on a few beta Elastra customers any day now (i.e., it may well not take until March, the original target).

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I may argue for the use of open source and other mid-range database management systems, but a lot of industry sentiment remains on the other side. Vendors of high-end RDBMS naturally advocate enterprise-wide single-vendor adoption. Many CIOs and industry analysts, overwhelmed by product proliferation, think that’s a neat idea as well.

And in fairness, they’re not entirely wrong. Here are 14 reasons for using high-end relational database management systems, even on applications for which mid-range DBMS would suffice. (more…)