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 source of strength (or focus).
Postgres is the opposite.
Postgres is an enterprise Java database, more suitable for carrying corporate data than the Web's consumer data. According to a 2009 survey by the Eclipse Foundation, MySQL (27.7 percent) and Oracle (27.3 percent) were the top-two databases used by those surveyed, with Postgres registering a respectable but still distant 9.9 percent.
Given that Oracle database users are far more likely to use Java as their programming language to develop server-centric applications, while MySQL users are three times more likely to use PHP as their primary language (17.4 percent of those surveyed use it, versus 5.4 percent for all users) to builde RIA/Web applications, Postgres is clearly more Oracle than MySQL.
Granted, the Eclipse community is traditionally Java-centric, so it's not surprising that Java would be prominent among its developers. But it's also the case that enterprise IT remains a Java/.Net market, and in such a market Postgres could be poised to boom if it can muster sufficient marketing to make its message heard.
This is where EnterpriseDB comes in.
The MySQL community would not be as well-developed as it is without MySQL, the company. MySQL AB has funded the overwhelming majority of MySQL database development, but it has also provided the marketing muscle to make a name for the Web database.
Postgres has traditionally been a standalone, organic open-source project with little concerted corporate involvement. EnterpriseDB has started to change that, but for too long wrongly fixated on competing with MySQL, a database that serves a different market and different developers. The company also spent too much time talking about Oracle migration technology, rather than focusing on why Postgres is a great database.
That may be changing.
Postgres just released version 8.4 of the venerable database. In EnterpriseDB's discussion of the release, there's no mention of Oracle, MySQL, or any other competitor. Instead, EnterpriseDB seems to be focusing more on its commitment to Postgres development, adding significant enterprise hardening through its open-source Postgres Plus distribution.
It's a welcome change, and one that could position Postgres to take a bigger share of the enterprise Java database market--not because it's cheaper than Oracle or more open than MySQL but because it's a great database in its own right.
That's the right messaging for EnterpriseDB...and Postgres.
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 database to run on EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL...and now IBM's DB2.
In other words, through this partnership with EnterpriseDB, IBM has gained the ability to easily migrate customers from Oracle to DB2--seamlessly, painlessly, freely.
This is obviously big news for EnterpriseDB, having the opportunity to work with IBM, but it's also big news for IBM, providing a nice off-ramp from Oracle and an on-ramp to the IBM DB2 highway.
This isn't, of course, the first time the two have worked together. IBM is an investor in EnterpriseDB and has been tracking the open-source database market for some time. This is the first time, however, that the two have banded together to target Oracle.
Expect sparks to fly.
I asked Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB, about the effects of the partnership on Oracle, and its acquisition of MySQL (in buying Sun):
IBM and EnterpriseDB have a shared interest here--to preserve customers' right to choose their database solutions, whether they're making a closed-source decision (DB2 vs. Oracle) or an open-source decision (MySQL vs. Postgres Plus). Oracle's moves aim to limit those choices; our intention is to promote them.
It remains to be seen whether Oracle will bury MySQL post-acquisition, but one thing is clear: the database market just became even more interesting. Arvind Krishna, vice president of database servers and development at IBM, said in a statement that "clients are increasingly taking advantage of DB2 to lower costs while improving the performance and reliability of their business applications."
That may have been the case before. With Oracle-compatibility built into DB2 via EnterpriseDB, IBM has positioned itself to make it happen now.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I'm not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's earlier books, Blink and Tipping Point. His "insights" tend to be obvious and provide little predictive power (i.e., knowing his theory does nothing to help you plot your way to success). Indeed, the most they provide is rear-view mirror insight into why something might have happened.
Gladwell's new book, Outliers, is no different, but I find it more interesting, perhaps in part because it helps to explain a complex subject in pithy prose. As The Wall Street Journal details in an engaging book review, Outliers identifies the necessary traits of successful people, only two of which do people have any control over. The last? Well, it's a matter of happenstance:
...[S]uccess seems to stem as much from context as from personal attributes. Intrinsic ability appears to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for exceptional achievement. It also helps to be born at the right time--the 1830s for titans of industry, the 1950s for computer whizzes--and in the right home environment, with the right cultural heritage. But the elements of success are not all matters of happenstance and talent: Hard work (practicing a skill for at least 10,000 hours) is essential, too, as even Mozart discovered....
... 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 in the same way that Boyajian helped to grow Red Hat's Linux business: starting with non-mission critical applications and growing into mission-critical applications within accounts over a multi-year engagement.
And, critically, it means emphasizing its drop-in Oracle compatibility as a way to immediately cut Oracle costs for non-mission critical applications, rather than going for the expensive, sales executive-driven rip-and-replace sales strategy.
I worried that MySQL would get buried in Sun in the short-term, affording open-source competitors like PostgreSQL (upon which EnterpriseDB is based) the chance to leapfrog it in accounts. The concern was, I think, misplaced, as EnterpriseDB's problem wasn't MySQL. It was its own strategic focus. (MySQL, for its part, has done quite well under Sun's banner, as The Register points out, and is getting creative with how it drives MySQL sales.
Boyajian seems to have turned that around and is now seeing business accelerate, particularly in transaction-heavy database applications where MySQL has traditionally not been as strong as PostgreSQL (and Oracle). In other words, EnterpriseDB is now poised to succeed alongside MySQL, not despite it or because of it. Additionally, with pricing at a fraction of the cost of an Oracle license and performance on par with Oracle, it's not only MySQL that will see competition from EnterpriseDB.
The database market just got some new competition with EnterpriseDB's renewed momentum. I think it's going to last.
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, a growing but still tiny gnat in the grand scheme of the database market, when it really should be focused on where the dollars are: Oracle.
EnterpriseDB used to do this, of course. That was once its big claim to fame: Drop-in compatibility with Oracle at a fraction of the cost. Now? Well, let's just say its "Great Debate" between itself and...no one from MySQL strikes me as a sham, and one that is guaranteed to get it roughly $0 in revenue.
Hint to aspiring open-source companies: Your competition isn't other open-source software. That's not where the dollars are (yet). Your competition is the inefficiencies and excessive pricing of the proprietary software world. That's where the "great debate" is.
Yes, the open-source database market is still relatively small (roughly $200 million in 2007, according to Gartner). But when The Wall Street Journal starts paying attention (subscription required), it's clear that the opportunity is huge. The Journal doesn't get paid to be sentimental.
Regardless, as Arjen Lentz opines,
...(D)isruptive technology tends to not take over the incumbent's market, but find or develop a completely new market, and indeed take over in that space. The question then is, does the incumbent's market remain intact, or does it change/evolve naturally and perhaps shrink or even completely disappear over time. Generally, the market-dominant incumbent continues to survive in a niche (where they are obviously dominant, but no longer in the market overall). In short, the market changes and with it its rules and demands.
Leading this market transformation is Sun Microsystems. Open-source databases (PostgreSQL and, especially, MySQL) may get a significant boost from Sun's involvement:
... Read moreGood things come in threes, as EnterpriseDB confirmed today. The company today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series C round, including backing from IBM. With $37.5 million in funding to date, EnterpriseDB isn't hurting for cash.
This, however, has not been EnterpriseDB's primary problem. It's not cash that it has lacked, but open-source cachet. Its story of "Oracle performance and interoperability at a fraction of the cost" is a winner, but it was muted by its lack of a compelling open-source story.
That just changed.
... Read moreMaybe there's still some fight in the PostgreSQL competition, after all. [Update: Or maybe it has more to do with internal changes at MySQL - see below.] According to data compiled by MarkMail, PostgreSQL messaging traffic dwarfs that of MySQL's, suggesting that the Postgres community is more active than MySQL's:
Comparing PostgreSQL and MySQL is kind of interesting. With all the talk about the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-Perl-Python) architecture you'd think MySQL had a lock on the open source database market, but based on simple message traffic analytics, PostgreSQL has a much higher level of community involvement. Looking at January 2000 onward, the MySQL lists have amassed 340,000 messages with about 3,000 new messages each month. In the same time period, the PostgreSQL lists have hit 583,000 messages with 7,000 new each month.
I'm surprised. A (highly imperfect) Google Trends analysis shows MySQL (blue) dwarfing PostgreSQL (red) in terms of search interest (but both are on the decline):
... Read moreIt's hard to take the question seriously, given that Google, Travelocity, etc. care deeply about their businesses, and entrust them to open-source databases. And yet the question still comes up, as it did at eWeek recently.
eWeek asked Kevin Closson, chief software architect for PolyServe-HP, who answered 'Yes,' open-source databases (like MySQL and Postgres) are serious alternatives to Oracle et al, but that it depends on the application:
... Read more
Charlie Babcock of InformationWeek is reporting results of a Sun survey that finds PostgreSQL to perform just 12% lower than Oracle on similarly-priced hardware. Not bad.
The database, of course, is not "similarly priced." The punchline, therefore, is that customers who pony up seven figures for their Oracle databases may well find that $0.00 can deliver near-equivalent performance. If only CIOs were paid based on the savings they generate while still cranking out hefty IT performance, many IT professionals might find open source databases like PostgreSQL under their Christmas trees.
... Read more
