I have started preparing the release notes for Postgres 9.0. I went into
great detail last year about how the release notes are created, so I
will not bore you with the mind-numbing details this time. I should be ready with the first draft in a week or two.
Update: I have completed stage #3. 2010-03-16 03:33:20 GMT
9.0 Release Notes CreationEnterpriseDB 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.
User Testimonial Video at PG EastMany people are waiting for Postgres 9.0, so here is a status report about the release. Two weeks ago we completed the last 9.0
CommitFest and released
9.0 Alpha 4. We are now working on a 9.0
open items list. There are relatively few open items compared to
previous major releases because there are now more developers focused on closing open items.
Once we deal with all the items on that list, and any new items that appear, we can release the first 9.0 beta. Technically, we could
release a beta before dealing with all open items as long as we are sure that none of the existing open items will require cluster
reinitialization (initdb).
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:
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.
More Philadelphia ActionI’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.
Give Me My Own CloudWith so many ways of electronically communicating in the Postgres community, why blog? I have thought about that question and want to
list the various electronically communication methods and their advantages:
Email: Email is great for task-oriented communication. It reaches a large audience and allows for deliberate, consensus-oriented
solutions.
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
Reliability
“Your”
Open Source
Humorous
Our Name
Update: Here is a more complete list.
Wanted: New Project SloganBased 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 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.
The Next Postgres Adoption WaveLast 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.
Postgres 9.0 ComingIt seems the European Commission studying the Oracle purchase of Sun/MySQL has finally realized Postgres is a viable open source alternative to MySQL and has approved the purchase:
The Commission’s investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market.
This article, titled in part, “If MySQL fails, there’s always PostgreSQL”, puts it even more succinctly. I know many MySQL people worked very hard campaigning against approval, and I am sure they are disappointed by the outcome. Postgres users should thank them because even though they lost, their work has increased the visibility of all open source databases, including PostgreSQL.
European Union Recognizes PostgreSQL
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