postgresql

Hard work, talent, and a whiff of luck: Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers'

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

EnterpriseDB finds its Postgres feet against Oracle

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 spoiling for the wrong fight

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

Report: Open-source databases on the rise

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 more

EnterpriseDB raises cash and its open-source profile

Good 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 more

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: Who has the best community?

Maybe 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 more

PostgreSQL 8.3 designed for better speed

Programmers behind the PostgreSQL project released the new version 8.3 of the open-source database software Monday, saying they've boosted improved performance 5 percent to 30 percent and added several useful features.

One of the performance improvements comes from a technology called heap-optimized tables, which reduces the amount of effort a computer must expend updating the frequently changed elements of the database. Other improvements reduce the penalty of taking periodic snapshots of the database and an speed some transactions though an "asynchronous commit" ability, the organization said.

Other features include "synchronized scan," which makes data … Read more

EnterpriseDB plops Postgres on Amazon's 'cloud'

EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com's hosted compute cloud.

The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.

Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.

The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in … Read more

PosgreSQL just shy of Oracle performance, at the rock-bottom price of $0.00

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