March 10th, 2010 by Bruce Momjian
EnterpriseDB believes in the marketing potential of videos. You might remember them producing a video of me explaining pg_migrator last year.
This year, they will be interviewing PG East attendees to create a Postgres user testimonial video. The community has not used videos extensively for marketing, partly because, while it is easy to create a video, it is difficult to create a good video. (Consider the quality of the average YouTube video.) Anyway, my guess is that the video will be something like this customer video. The video will be shared with the community to help promote Postgres worldwide.
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Posted in Trade Shows, postgresql | 1 Comment »
February 26th, 2010 by Bruce Momjian
A month ago I mentioned a surprising number of Postgres activities in Philadelphia. One month later, those events are past but now there are more.
First, PG East is shaping up to be a big conference:
- The conference agenda looks very full, with both developer and business-oriented talks. The business-oriented focus is rather new for Postgres conferences, and I think signals more mainstream adoption of Postgres.
- It is at the Warwick Hotel. This lobby photo should give you a good idea of how nice the hotel is — we will simply have to adjust to having a Postgres conference in a fancy hotel.
- Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research will be speaking. He is the person who authored last year’s Forrester Wave report that found Ingres and MySQL as the leading open source databases (news report). You can judge for yourself how much “research” went into that report, but we will be nice to him — a bodyguard will be unnecessary.
Registrations are now being accepted. There is a useful “Reasons to Attend” page that will help people who are undecided.
Second, it looks like I will be co-teaching a database class at Drexel University again this summer, but this time, a new, more advanced class that will highlight Postgres technology. Drexel wants to expand their database offerings and train skilled Postgres engineers. Postgres certainly offers students a unique opportunity to understand database technology.
Posted in Trade Shows, Training/Education, postgresql | 1 Comment »
February 25th, 2010 by Jim Mlodgenski
I’ve recently attended several Cloud Computing forums and panels, and the general feeling throughout most of the audience has been that the promise of Cloud Computing sounds great, but many organizations are still apprehensive about moving to a public cloud such as Amazon’s EC2. This is understandable given security concerns and just the general feeling of a lack of control, so the concept of private clouds becomes a great solution. It allows organizations to use the power of Cloud Computing without ever leaving the friendly confines of their own data center. There are many products that enable this such as VMWare’s vShere and the open source product Eucalyptus with many more on the way. When you look at this architecturally, this really is the next generation of virtualization giving administrators more power to efficiently use their physical resources.
The other interesting trend was the types of applications organizations are considering for use in the cloud. While there is much talk about replatforming existing application onto Cloud Computing infrastructures, many organizations seem to people getting their feet wet with new applications. They seem to be fairly traditional applications and not leveraging the elasticity of the cloud and they are just leveraging the financial benefits of not needed to procure new hardware. This trend show a lot of great promise for PostgreSQL given that Oracle does not have a favorable licensing model in virtualized environments. While Oracle is expensive in traditional environments, much of the cost benefits are eroded when Oracle is needed in a cloud environment. This is leading many people to open source solutions and PostgreSQL is a natural fit for many Oracle users.
Tags: cloud, database savings, open source, oracle, postgresql
Posted in Open Source Tools, postgresql | 9 Comments »
February 1st, 2010 by Jim Mlodgenski
One of the promises of Cloud Computing is the ease of spinning up new instances and adding them to an existing application allowing for elasticity, but actually doing that in practice is anything but simple. Increasing the complexity would be adding another dimension of wanting to accomplish this across multiple cloud vendors. This is important for some SAAS vendors that want redundancy or just for organizations wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. An open source project by Red Hat called DeltaCloud shows the promise of on day allowing this, but the functionality of actually configuring a running instance is not addressed. RightScale has a number of Ruby Gems that addresses the same problem as DeltaCloud, but again, it falls short on configuring a running instance. These two projects will probably progress together since DeltaCloud actually uses the RightScale Gems under the covers. A project that handles configuring running instances well is Cloud Tools which powers Cloud Foundry for SpringSource. Cloud Tools provides a simple way to configure running instances in complex deployments which even includes setting up replication between 2 database servers. The downside is that it only works for Amazon’s EC2. Since all of the projects are open, jamming them together could be a powerful combination and may be necessary as cloud deployments become more complex across providers.
Tags: cloud, open source
Posted in Open Source Tools | 3 Comments »
January 29th, 2010 by Bruce Momjian
On Monday Josh Berkus requested suggestions for a new Postgres slogan. Our current slogan, “The world’s most advanced open source database”, was chosen in the early years of the project to distinguish ourselves from other open source databases, and it is easy to see why we should consider a change at this time. The suggestions fit into several categories, some serious, some humorous. Continued discussion is taking place on the advocacy (pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org) email list.
General
- PostgreSQL: The Elephant Never Forgets
- PostgreSQL: Enjoy Your Database Again
- PostgreSQL: The Professional Database Solution
- PostgreSQL: Meet the Future
- PostgreSQL: It Simply Works
Reliability
- PostgreSQL: Reclaim Your Database
- PostgreSQL: Because Your Data Is Worth It
- PostgreSQL: Setting the Standard For Following the Standard
- PostgreSQL: It’s ACID!
“Your”
- PostgreSQL: YourSQL
- PostgreSQL: Your Next Database
- PostgreSQL: Your Open Source Database
- PostgreSQL: Your Data is Important
- PostgreSQL: Your Data: Any time, Any Place
Open Source
- PostgreSQL: Free Forever
- PostgreSQL: Powerful Freedom
- PostgreSQL: Liberate Your Data!
- PostgreSQL: The ‘Open’ Open Source Database
- PostgreSQL: Open-Source Database, Open-Ended Possibilities
Humorous
- PostgreSQL: The Open Source Elephant Memory
- PostgreSQL: Even Better With Bacon!
- PostgreSQL: Less Complex Than Oracle (But That Doesn’t Mean Much)
- PostgreSQL: Duh
- PostgreSQL: We Won’t Be Bought Out
- PostgreSQL: Licensed To kill
Our Name
- PostgreSQL: Unpronounceably awesome!
- PostgreSQL: The most powerful software you can’t pronounce
- PostgreSQL: It’s OK to call it Postgres, just not Postgre
- Postgres: Who stole my QL?
Update: Here is a more complete list.
Posted in postgresql | 1 Comment »
January 28th, 2010 by Bruce Momjian
Based on recent discussions, I am wondering if Postgres is poised for a significant adoption increase in the next year. This is based on a few events:
- The upcoming Postgres 9.0 release, which I just blogged about
- The unstable economy, which is causing many companies to rethink their software spending practices
- The uncertainty surrounding other databases, both proprietary and open source
The last time Postgres appeared poised for another adoption increase was in 2005, with the release of PostgreSQL 8.0, when the native Windows port was introduced. I would say that release marked the point where Postgres became a respected open source database; prior to that we had a reputation of being slow and hard to manage. We had made changes for years before that, but the 8.0 release helped solidify our reputation.
The 9.0 release has the potential for Postgres to move from a respected open source database to a respected mainstream database, because, frankly, how many other databases are attracting new users at the rate we are? — very few.
Posted in postgresql | No Comments »
January 28th, 2010 by Bruce Momjian
Last week Dave Page announced that the next major release of Postgres will be numbered 9.0, rather than 8.5 as previous expected. This change was made because the next major PostgreSQL release will include built-in log-streaming replication, and that has always been considered a feature worthy of increasing the first version number.
While Postgres has had log-based replication support for a few releases, the 9.0 release will allow logs to be streamed to the slave using network transfer, which greatly increases the frequency at which logs can reasonably be sent. It also allows the slave server to accept read-only queries (hot standby), again a major feature addition.
Posted in postgresql | 1 Comment »
January 19th, 2010 by Jim Mlodgenski
The recent Streaming Replication patch committed to the PostgreSQL source tree is the potential killer feature that can catapult PostgreSQL into a prominent position in the cloud computing landscape. This combined with Hot Standby fills a major void in PostgreSQL by providing a replication solution native to the core engine and allows for a horizontally scalable solution without any bolt ons. This is a key piece of functionality to leverage the elasticity promise of compute clouds. While it has always been possible to use replication with PostgreSQL, integrating this into the core will allow new PostgreSQL users to easily use replication without feeling overwhelmed by learning Slonik scripts. What is most exciting about this is the timing of when this is all happening. With the uncertainty of the future of MySQL, there are more people than ever looking at PostgreSQL and one of the biggest historical knocks on PostgreSQL is the lack of an integrated replication solution. This is huge as this new audience starts to look at PostgreSQL and realize that PostgreSQL can more than fit their needs as an open source database instead of MySQL.
Tags: cloud, mysql, postgres, postgresql, replication
Posted in mysql, postgresql | 39 Comments »
January 11th, 2010 by Jim Mlodgenski
Cloud Computing is the new big wave in the Information technology industry, but it is an amorphous term that is commonly misunderstood. I talk to people everyday who are confused by the Cloud, but Cloud Computing is simply a shared computing resource and has actually been part of the IT landscape for many years. The Cloud Computing ecosystem can be split into three categories, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS can be considered the first major breakthrough in what is considered Cloud Computing today with services such as Salesforce.com and email hosting like Gmail and Hotmail. PaaS evolved out of the success of successful SaaS offering and spawned platforms allowing users to enhance SaaS offerings with platforms like the Google App Engine and Force.com. The latest category of Cloud Computing of IaaS is driving the excitement. This includes Storage Clouds and most importantly Compute Clouds. Compute Clouds are shared environments providing virtualized Operating Systems allowing users a platform to deploy applications with greater control over the resources and the ability to deploy the applications of their choice. These Compute Clouds are where PostgreSQL can be used to back any sort of application you would run inside a traditional data center. These different types of Clouds and the use of the common Cloud Computing terminology among them leads to the confusion of what Cloud Computing really is and ultimately leads to the common question I hear “Does PostgreSQL run in the Cloud?”…Of course it does…
Tags: cloud, postgres, postgresql
Posted in Uncategorized, postgresql | 50 Comments »
