enterprisedb

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

Pop quiz:

You are a new startup, looking to break into a big market. To do so you should: a) Focus on differentiating against and beating the biggest vendor in that market b) Focus on differentiating against and beating the most successful tiny vendor in that market c) Focus on creating a compelling value differentiation from all other vendors in the market and disrupt the economics of that market

Answer? It could be a mixture of "a" and "c," but I'd be hard-pressed to agree with any strategy built on "b." Unfortunately, EnterpriseDB continues to fixate on MySQL, … Read more

Hi5 is one of the world's largest social networks, with over 56 million monthly visitors. It's a company that demands maximum scale and performance from its infrastructure.

As such, it's no surprise that Hi5 recently opted to go with PostgreSQL as supported by EnterpriseDB.

PostgreSQL? Isn't that an open-source database? It can handle that load?

Indeed.

Hi5 runs hundreds of PostgreSQL servers in one of the world's largest commercial OLTP PostgreSQL installations. All Hi5 subscriber data, including user profiles, metadata associated with user photos, and comments, is stored on the company's PostgreSQL databases...In June 2008, the PostgreSQL-based system delivered more than 18.5 billion page views, serving nearly 11 million visitors to the site every day.

A key challenge and requirement for Hi5 is that the social-networking site cannot be taken offline for maintenance. The company's PostgreSQL databases must deliver exceptional stability and performance 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year to serve users around the globe. Any issues must be resolved in real time, with the system still running.

That's extreme performance, and stands as a continued testament to open source and its increasingly routine ability to deliver significant performance at a lower cost, just as Red Hat announced earlier today in its Linux benchmarks.

However, the real story in Hi5's decision is its work with EnterpriseDB. The Web 2.0 world has traditionally adopted open source heavily...and paid little to nothing for it. Hence, the real news here is one Web 2.0 company's realization that buying support for open-source software makes a lot of sense/cents.… Read more

Ed Boyajian, former vice president and general manager, North American sales, Red Hat, has been named as EnterpriseDB's new president and CEO. Andy Astor will assume the role of executive vice president of Business Development at EnterpriseDB, and has no doubt breathed a huge sigh of relief at giving up the reins to Ed.

This is just one of the three new open-source CEOs I reported a few weeks back.

Savio rightly suggests that this is a positive indicator of EnterpriseDB's/PostgreSQL's health, rather than an indication of any ailment at Red Hat. Even so, I wouldn'… Read more