EnterpriseDB

On March 3, database vendor EnterpriseDB is set to release the results of its survey conducted at the JavaOne conference last September in San Francisco.

More than 600 IT professionals completed the survey, the results of which provide a bit of insight into community sentiment regarding Oracle's control of open-source projects Java and MySQL.

While opinion polls generally tend to be fairly unscientific--especially when sponsored by rival vendors--the results seem to indicate the IT community is wary of Oracle's plans.

According to the results, 46 percent of respondents believe that open-source projects such as MySQL will stagnate under … Read more

In 2010, the talk about a "big data" trend has reached a fever pitch. "Big data" centers around the notion that organizations are now (or soon will be) dealing with managing and extracting information from databases that are growing into the multi-petabyte range.

This dramatic amount of data has caused developers to seek new approaches that tend to avoid SQL queries and instead process data in a distributed manner. These so-called "NoSQL," such as Cassandra and MongoDB databases, are built to scale easily and handle massive amounts of data in a highly fluid manner.

And while I am a staunch supporter of the NoSQL approach, there is often a point where all of this data needs to be aggregated and parsed for different reasons, in a more traditional SQL data model.

It occurred to me recently that I've heard very little from the relational database (RDBMS) side of the house when it comes to dealing with big data. To that end, I recently caught up via e-mail with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, whose company provides services, support, and training around the open-source relational database PostgreSQL.

Boyajian stressed four points:

1. Relational databases can process ad-hoc queries

Production applications sometimes require only primary key lookups, but reporting queries often need to filter or aggregate based on other columns. Document databases and distributed key value stores sometimes don't support this at all, or they may support it only if an index on the relevant column has been defined in advance.

2. SQL reduces development time and improves interoperability

SQL is, and will likely remain, one of the most popular and successful computer languages of all time. SQL-aware development tools, reporting tools, monitoring tools, and connectors are available for just about every combination of operating system, platform, and database under the sun, and nearly every programmer or IT professional has at least a passing familiarity with SQL syntax.

Even for the types of relatively simple queries that are likely to be practical on huge data stores, writing an SQL query is typically simpler and faster than writing an algorithm to compute the desired answer, as is often necessary for data stores that do not include a query language. … Read more

The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.

Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?

Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a … Read more

Postgres for years has lived in the shadow of MySQL's media attention: the "boring" database that quietly goes about its work while its sexy Web 2.0 cousin wins the popularity contest.

Recent data from the Eclipse Foundation, however, suggest that Postgres may be ready to make significant waves in the enterprise, even if it doesn't make headlines.

In a recent letter to European Union's commissioner of competition, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos stressed that MySQL's target market is the emerging Web database market and that the enterprise IT market was never really a … Read more

IBM is going on the offensive against the pending merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle.

IBM announced Wednesday that it nabbed 100 of Sun's and Hewlett-Packard's customers last quarter alone for its high-end servers and mainframes, with half the deals worth over $1 million each, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The bigger news, however, may be IBM's partnership with EnterpriseDB, the commercial backer of the open-source PostgreSQL database, to embed EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server technology into IBM's DB2 9.7 database product. EnterpriseDB's technology basically allows applications written for the Oracle … Read more

While Sun Microsystems' MySQL gets the limelight, with its 55 percent quarterly billings increase, other open-source database competitors like Ingres and Enterprise are also doing well.

Ingres on Tuesday reported a significant uptick in its 2008 revenue, climbing 32 percent to $68 million over $52 million in 2007. EnterpriseDB didn't provide revenue numbers, but it also recently reported a banner year, with greater than 50 percent growth in new customer accounts and "comparable bookings growth."

New Ingres customers in 2008 include Air Enterprises, Allied Express, Banca IFIS SpA, BBP Partners, CondeNast Publications, Connected Wedding, C&K … Read more

To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.

No, the real story is who InfoWorld chose to profile.

Sure, you get the obligatory Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond call-outs, because these are two of the guys that formed the foundation of open source upon which the rest of us build. But they're the only throwbacks to the "good ol' days" … Read more

In June 2008, EnterpriseDB named Ed Boyajian, former Red Hat executive, as its CEO. At the time I had lost interest in EnterpriseDB and wondered why someone with Boyajian's pedigree would go there.

Well, I had the chance to talk with Boyajian today and I'm starting to see his interest in EnterpriseDB. In particular, I believe Boyajian brings EnterpriseDB precisely what it needed: sales-level execution and strategy to complement the product-level execution and strategy it already had done well.

What, specifically, does this mean? It means moving to an inside-sales model. It means growing the open-source database business … Read more

EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek was kind enough to have me on the his Database Radio program, with the audio feed here and the transcript here (PDF), which proved to be fun to record and hopefully an enlightening listen.

Bob asked me to name the top trends in open source. Here's my answer:

There have been two big ones that I've noticed lately. One is the opening up of the Web. Traditionally the Web (infrastructure) was open, but increasingly we have things like applications moving to the Web, things like Facebook, that were proprietary--maybe built on open source, but … Read more