Yesterday, I wrote a blog post on whether and to what extend the PostgreSQL community is a welcoming community, in which I quoted some remarks that Selena Deckelmann made, and she responded with her own post on where meritocracy fails.? I want to just recap a few things that may not be totally obvious to casual observers of our community; and then I have a few remarks about meritocracy.

Read more ?

Some time ago, I attended an open source conference in Amsterdam where one of the key speakers representing a global consultancy company said, “2011 is all about ‘doing’.” What he meant by this is that there has been enough open source ‘evangelization’ and now it is time to move to the next level. Naturally, he was talking about open source software in general, but it also applies to the database industry as well.

I’ve heard similar sentiments (around the notion of moving from evangelizing to doing) while speaking with our customers from Norway to Italy and everywhere in between. They talk about how many companies, despite understanding the value and cost benefits of moving some of their database infrastructure off Oracle or some other legacy proprietary database, are very slow to actually do something about it. They have already taken the time and effort to evaluate future IT needs and deduced that their limited IT budgets won’t allow them to scale properly. They understand that their data increases in size and complexity every year and that puts more pressure on their existing IT infrastructure (not to mention causing software license costs to skyrocket).

By default, IT departments have been forced to do more with less. Key decision makers today recognize the need to move off a dated hardware focused approach to a more logical one – solving business problems.  As a result, adoption of new computing models such as virtualization and cloud computing is off the charts.  It doesn’t seem to matter whether you speak to Finnish, Russian, English, Dutch, French or any other nationalities – the story is the same. Virtualization and the cloud allow organizations to allocate money on real innovation (instead of IT infrastructure) and ultimately increase competitive advantages.

Customers I speak with are also concerned about license costs. If they are heavy Oracle users, an agonizing pain is felt every time a renewal date encroaches. To ease the pain, many companies have decided to take measures to solve this problem once and for all: database migration.  Everybody understands that changing a crucial piece of your software stack is not quite the same as a Sunday stroll in the park; it requires a carefully orchestrated project plan involving all key stakeholders in the company. But, these people are willing to go through this phase for the promised benefits – major savings and reduced TCO.

So, with these words, let’s continue our 2011 mission – moving from just evangelizing about the benefits of switching to alternative databases, but to actually doing it.

I attended PostgreSQL East last week and, as usual, the most interesting discussions were the ones that nobody planned.? Ed Boyajian, the CEO here at EnterpriseDB where I work, threw out a remark to the effect that the PostgreSQL community is a meritocracy.? Selena Deckelmann wasn't convinced, "not to say that we don't do try hard, and do pretty well."? During the closing session, Josh Drake made some remarks to the effect that, in effect, the process for submitting a patch to PostgreSQL is long, difficult, and fraught with arbitrary and capricious rejection, which caused me to rise to my feet and object that that while it's not perfect, I think we do pretty well, and better than we used to.? Josh agreed with some of what I have to say, and I see his point, too.? But it got me thinking about the whole way that we operate as a development community, and what is good and bad about it.
Read more ?

We’ve gotten numerous requests from cloud focused users for an Amazon cloud instance of Postgres Plus Standard Server v9.0 (the open source version available from EnterpriseDB). I’m pleased to announce that it is now available.

For detailed instructions on how to get started using Postgres Plus AMIs please visit: http://www.enterprisedb.com/solutions/postgres-plus-cloud-computing

If you have questions or feedback on using the AMIs or just want to interact with other AMI users then check out our dedicated forum at: http://forums.enterprisedb.com/forums/show/18.page

If you follow Twitter for keywords like “postgres” or “postgresql”, you may well have seen a number of tweets over the last day or so regarding a so-called “Payload Execution” exploit in PostgreSQL. This supposed attack was apparently first described in this paper, and has hit Twitter after code to demonstrate the issue was added to Metasploit.

The “attack” works like this:

1. A user uploads a payload as a large object to the database. This can be done using the client side lo_create() and lo_import() functions.
2. The user then uses the server-side lo_export() function to export the payload to the server’s filesystem.
3. The user then executes the payload, by creating an SQL level function to wrap the C function in the payload, eg:
   CREATE FUNCTION do_bad_stuff() RETURNS int4 AS ‘$libdir/bad_stuff.dll’ LANGUAGE C;
   
4. The user then executes the payload:
   SELECT do_bad_stuff();

Here’s the problem with the “exploit”:

EnterpriseDB was a Platnium Sponsor of TheServerSide Java Symposium Conference last week.  Here are a few key takeaways and highlights from the conference:

- It was great to be at a Java conference that was entirely based on Server-side Java. Server-side Java is one of my few technical passions (as I mentioned in previous posts, PostgreSQL has become another).

-James Gosling gave a great keynote. It had been difficult for me to not see him at JavaOne this past fall. I loved seeing him together with the Java crowd again. His keynote was very forward looking as he discussed his thoughts on the industry particularly around cloud computing. James was entertaining and insightful as ever.

-There was a panel specifically about the JCP. Patrick Curran, Reza Raman and James Gosling were the panelist. Cameron McKenzie,from TheServerSide.com was the show’s MC and moderator. For the most part, tough questions were asked and answered. At the end of the day, I felt as though decisions had been made, Java and the JCP were moving forward again. All though it is now with out some of the previous industry stalwarts such as Doug Lea. A quick check of the TIOBE index shows that Java is in good shape. It will be interesting to see how Java EE and Java SE progress over the next year. I must confess, I am disappointed to not see more Java EE 6 certifications at this point. However, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Resin has passed the Web profile TCK.

-In terms of conference themes, cloud is definitely all the rage this year. It was prevalent in every keynote and had it’s own dedicated track.

-Oracle was also a Platinum sponsor at the event. Jerome Dochez, the GlassFish architect gave several good talks on GlassFish, including the vendor sponsored keynote. As usual, he was great. I got the overall impression that GlassFish was in great shape, which naturally made me feel good. In the coming weeks, I plan to write another blog on how to get it working quickly and easily with PostgreSQL.

-I spent time at the Resin booth. This is a product I am definitely going to check out. Many people at the conference told me it is a great application server.

-Some vendors who were notably missing from the conference were JBoss and Cloudbees. This was disappointing because I wanted to hear more about their product plans and what they are doing these days. Although Cloudbees did not attend the conference, they got a lot of love from James Gosling in his keynote. Hudson (Kohsuke Kawaguchi the creator of Hudson works for Cloudbees) also got love from Rod Johnson in his track keynote on cloud computing.

-I attended Rod Johnson’s track keynote on cloud computing. All though I disagreed strongly with some of the things he said, I genuinely enjoyed the keynote. Code2Cloud also looks rather interesting. As for what I disagreed with, Rod claimed that there were three platforms that would be relevant in the cloud: “Spring, Ruby on Rails and .NET”. I will give him .NET. I will even give him Spring as being relevant in the cloud. As for Ruby on Rails, every indication I can see is that it has a small and passionate community. However, it is no longer seeing the growth it saw several years ago. If you believe in the TIOBE Index as a status of how programming languages are doing, Ruby has seen a decline year over year. Also, missing from his list was Java EE. With the release of Java EE 6,  the complexity issues that led to the creation of Spring no longer exist. Java EE 7 if executed with pace will definitely be a very relevant platform for cloud computing.

So, on to what I was there to do:

EnterpriseDB gave me the pleasure of delivering a vendor technical session. My talk was entitled “PostgreSQL from Development to Deployment.” It is the pre-cursor for a talk Bruce Momjian and Robin Schumacher will be giving at MySQL Con in less than a month.  I felt very comfortable with the audience at the show since I have been working either on or with Server-side Java products and technologies ever since they appeared.

Several days before the conference began, much to my disappointment it became clear that Karen Tegan Padir would not be able to deliver the vendor keynote. As a company, we made the decision to have me present the keynote. I was a bit nervous going into this given it has been a years since I had spoken to an audience of this size. Karen and I spent some time discussing what I should talk about. From there, I spent several nights reflecting on my time at Sun building the Java Platform; what went well and what did not. For those of you who don’t know, I was the first Java Consultant / ISV Engineer hired by Sun’s Javasoft division and was part of the original Java management and architecture teams for the J2EE platform. In the keynote, I described what went well and what did not go well in my nearly 15 year adventure with Java. I explained the similarities I am now seeing in the development of the cloud platform and how the lessons we learned developing the Java will apply to the cloud.

From what I could tell, the keynote was well received. Several folks came up to me and said it was a great presentation for this audience. I had plenty of friends in the audience who would have been more than willing to tell me if it was a dud. I actually got a laugh (at a joke!) during the presentation. However, the biggest indication that it was a success was that my technical session on PostgreSQL that followed the keynote was extremely well attended. We had about 54 people show up. Not bad given that I would estimate the overall conference attendance to be about 350 people.

There was also plenty of interest in PostgreSQL especially after I explained the history of the source code. A lot of folks came by our booth to talk about it further. It took me back to 1996 when I first started talking to folks about Java. Although PostgreSQL has been around for a very long time, I feel as though many people are just starting to discover it as though it were brand new. For those of you who attended the session, I will be writing a blog on a how to set up the demo.

In summary, it was great to spend time with old colleagues and friends. It was also great to make a bunch of new friends and hear what people have been up to in the world of Java. However, it was tough to lose so badly at blackjack!

I’m pleased to report that we seem to be making good progress toward PostgreSQL 9.1beta.  As we did for PostgreSQL 9.0, we are maintaining a list of open items that we need either to address or to decide that they aren’t so important after all (there are also some issues that are being discussed on the mailing list that aren’t reflected in that open items list).  What we’re really doing here is trying to stabilize the code, particularly with respect to the features committed at the very end of the development cycle.  So far, the main problem areas appear to be (1) collation support, (2) changes to streaming replication, especially the new synchronous replication feature, and (3) the new serializable isolation level.  But we are making rapid progress in sorting out the loose ends, and I feel a lot better about the release now than I did even a week ago.

Barring objections or unforeseen problems, I’m hoping to bundle an alpha5 release a week from today, on Monday, March 28.  We haven’t discussed the time line for beta yet, other than to hope that we’ll be able to get there in April.  I still think that’s a realistic timeline, although there is quite a bit of work that must be done between now and then for us to hit it.  In the meantime, if you’re in a position to build from source, please keep testing and sending in bug reports.  Thanks!

I have completed drafting the Postgres 9.1 release notes. They
will be updated and improved in the coming months as we approach the final release. Release note generation was easier this time (4.5
days) because git was quicker at returning commit details.