Bruce Momjian

Postgres Blog


This blog is about my work on the Postgres open source database, and is also published on Planet PostgreSQL.

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The Pain of Software Development

Friday, July 30, 2010

Adding features to Postgres is often a frustrating experience for all involved. Some features are clear-cut, but many are subject to interpretation and involve much email discussion. The email discussion is often draining, but this comment from a Slashdot thread about Linux desktop innovation is illuminating. The comment is about human interface engineereers asking for tiny application changes to improve usability, and while the application developer was originally "distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life", he ultimately agreed that the changes improved the user experience. I think Postgres developers often feel the same way.

Completed User Testimonial Videos from PG East

Monday, July 26, 2010

I mentioned in March that user videos would be created at PG East. Those videos have now been released. Hopefully they will be useful in promoting Postgres.

SURGE Conference

Sunday, July 25, 2010

I have decide to attend the SURGE conference in Baltimore in September. It is being hosted by Postgres-friendly OmniTI, who just did several Postgres-related presentations at OSCON (Robert Treat, Theo Schlossnagle). As a database internals guy, my focus is so much on the software that I often know little about how Postgres is deployed at high-volume sites; I hope to learn about that at the conference. With so much Postgres activity in the United States now, I am doing little travel to international conferences (schedule).

OSCON 2010 Report

Sunday, July 25, 2010

I had a great time again at OSCON, and feel more energized than ever about Postgres. Because I attend OSCON every year, it is a great event to gauge changes in Postgres adoption and mindshare. Years ago, Postgres visibility at OSCON was minimal, but now Postgres is a major player at the conference. For example, our booth this year was no longer in the open source section (A.K.A. the open source ghetto), but in the section with commercial vendors. We had abundant booth staffing, thanks to Gabrielle, and artistically designed staff t-shirts (image, image), thanks to Josh Berkus. I think we were moved to the commercial section because our booth staff and activity often overwhelm smaller booths.

The conference had major tutorials (1, 2) and sessions about Postgres, and Postgres as often mentioned in non-database-specific sessions, including the closing session. I heard one non-database session polled the audience about how many attendees had lost data on specific databases — obviously we did very well in that poll.

So, in summary, great conference, great presentations, and Postgres looked great too!

One Week to the Postgres Pool Party

Saturday, July 24, 2010

There is one week until the Postgres Pool Party at my home. No RSVP necessary.

Postgres Coming to the International Space Station

Friday, July 16, 2010

An email list posting this week revealed that Postgres will be used on the International Space Station by the end of the year, specifically "to store the data on orbit and then replicate that db on the ground". Postgres has always been heavily used by NASA and other government agencies, but this is a uniquely "high"-profile use of Postgres.

PostgreSQL 9.0 Illustrated

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Some Postgres users have created an detailed outline of Postgres 9.0 features with practical examples of almost every feature. If you are curious about what is coming in 9.0 or are confused by the 9.0 release notes, this is a must read.

Another Drexel University Course

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

I am teaching another Drexel University database class this summer called Database Theory. This class builds on the Database Systems class I taught last summer, and again heavily uses Postgres. The class covers many of the practical challenges of database management, like replication, internals, security, and managing large systems. As you can see from the syllabus, I was able to enlist the help of local open source contributors as guest lecturers. The first class is tomorrow.

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Postgres Pool Party

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

If you are near Philadelphia, you are invited to attend the 2010 Postgres Pool Party at my home:

All Postgres users, developers, and groupies are invited, including their families. No need to RSVP — just come.

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Updated Presentation: The Magic of Hot Streaming Replication

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I have simplified my presentation, The Magic of Hot Streaming Replication, to show a hot/streaming setup without the need to archive WAL files. This greatly simplifies the setup, and is possible thanks to wal_keep_segments, which allows the retention of a sufficient number of WAL files in /pg_xlog for the slave without the requirement of configuring continuous archiving.

When I originally researched hot standby and streaming replication, I focused on it as an extension of continuous archiving, but I now realize that continuous archiving is unnecessary and overly-complicates the setup if all you need is a read-only, standby server, and don't need the point-in-time recovery features of continuous archiving.

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Postgres on Amazon's EC2

Monday, May 31, 2010

This email thread discusses the advantages (ease of management) and disadvantages (uneven performance, poor reliability) of running Postgres on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) using Elastic Block Stores (EBS). It includes the idea of using multiple EBS volumes in RAID10, and using multiple EC2 database clusters for redundancy. One quote is telling, "It's possible to run a larger database on EC2, but it takes a lot of work, careful planning and a thick skin." A similar thread from a year ago had a similar cost/benefit analysis.

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Financial Disincentive

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

While conventional economics theorizes that increased rewards always leads to better output, this video suggests that many activities, particularly creative ones, produce worse output with increased rewards. The video shows various cases where this can happen, and even interviews open source contributors as a tangible example of people working without financial reward.

This video answers a question I have been asked many times, "Why do people contribute to open source?", and it answers it better than I ever have. Basically, once people have adequate compensation, people are often motivated more by creative challenges than by money. A corollary of this is that financial reward can distort creative output. This might explain why the Postgres user and developer experience feels different from proprietary software — because there are few financial distortions to interfere with the creative work of designing and using Postgres.

Update: Another video about financial incentives

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Pg_Migrator Included in Postgres 9.0, Renamed to Pg_Upgrade

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

After community discussion, pg_migrator has been renamed to "pg_upgrade" and will be an additional supplied module (/contrib) in the main server distribution of Postgres 9.0 (documentation). (It will appear in Postgres 9.0 beta 2.) Pg_Upgrade supports upgrades from Postgres 8.3.X and 8.4.X to Postgres 9.0. As you can see from the documentation, many of the restrictions of upgrading from 8.3 to 8.4 are gone, even for upgrades from Postgres 8.3 directly to 9.0.

This signals a more serious committment from the community to try to provide non-dump/restore major upgrades. The pg_migrator pgFoundry project will continue, but will not be enhanced to support new major versions of Postgres — it will remain only to support upgrades to Postgres 8.4.

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New Replication Option

Monday, April 26, 2010

It is rare for me to hear about a new replication option, but I heard about one involving pgpool-II last week at the New York PostgreSQL Meetup Group. pgpool-II is not only a connection pooler but supports load balancing by sending data-modification queries to every host, while it load-balances read-only queries across all hosts.

One major problem with this usage is that non-deterministic functions, e.g. random(), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, can produce different results when sent to multiple hosts. pgpool-II 2.3 and later handles some of these cases, but not all of them. Fully-correct operation requires either developers or administrators to handle unsupported non-deterministic functions. This new replication option involves using pgpool-II in 'master_slave_mode', which causes all data modification queries to be sent to the master, and the master replicates those changes (without non-deterministic side-effects) to the other slave nodes in the pgpool cluster. This diagram (page 19) illustrates this setup.

This new configuration allows pgpool-II to be used in more complex environments with reduced developer and administrator maintenance. Postgres 9.0's hot standby feature makes this even easier to use.

Update: pgpool 3.0 will improve routing of write queries to the master.

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Creeping to Beta

Monday, April 26, 2010

With the final Postgres 9.0 commitfest completed two months ago, you might be wondering what is delaying 9.0 beta 1. Along with the normal cleanup of open items, most of the time has been spent finalizing the behavior of our two big 9.0 features, streaming replication and hot standby (which I mentioned previously; presentation available).

Someone asked me to explain what that testing process looks like, and the most graphic description I could think of was a massive automobile accident (photo; those fire trucks are our developers analyzing the failure ). It is as ugly as an automobile accident, e.g.:

Postgres has a reputation for adding features that are reliable, even if those features are complex. That doesn't happen by accident — all the work happening now is to make sure these features are as robust and as easy to use as possible when 9.0 is released. I would love to avoid this messy period, but there is no alternatives if Postgres 9.0 is to be as good as all previous Postgres releases. The good news is we are getting close to being ready for beta.

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VM Me

Monday, April 19, 2010

Initially the lure of Virtual Machines (VM) was to allow multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a laptop. This is particularly useful if you need to run many applications that are only supported certain operating systems, e.g. MS Office. VMs have also always been popular for testing and development. (This video presents a simplified explaination of virtualization.)

However, recently VM usage has grown and are now regularly used on production servers. This recent community email post highlights the advantages of using VMs for production deployments:

VMs seem to have the greatest benefit for production use when the deployments or workload are dynamic, or many operating systems are involved. However, there are still legitimate concerns over VM use in production. The VM does add overhead compared to raw-iron deployments (5-10%). Another concern is that the fsync flush to disk properly happens through the VM layer (email).

Postgres has some advantages when used with VMs:

VMs that allow adding memory and CPU without restart (e.g. vSphere, Xen) can take advantage of many of these features dynamically. In fact, the only configuration setting that can't be modified without database restart to take advantage of "hot" (non-restart) resource changes is shared_buffers.

We clearly are going to be seeing more installations of Postgres on VM and cloud architectures in the future. If you are interested in how cloud computing relates to virtualization, this video explains it well.

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SSDs For Your Database?

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Solid-state drives (SSD) are getting larger and more popular. Initially, SSDs appeared to be ideal for databases because they potentially allow fast I/O with non-volatile storage — unfortunately, neither of these is completely true. Let me explain:

Fast I/O: While SSDs offer random I/O speeds far in excess of traditional hard drives (because there are no moving platters or heads), the sequential I/O speed of SSDs is only marginally better than mechanical drives. Database activity that causes random I/O, like index scans that do not fit in RAM, will benefit from SSDs' superior random I/O speeds, but sequential scans only marginally benefit by using SSDs. (Greg Smith explains the limited use-case for SSDs in this email.) Postgres 9.0 will allow random page cost to be set per tablespace so administrators can indicate that random I/O has the same speed as sequential I/O for SSD-based tablespaces.

Non-Volatile Storage: Because SSDs offer permanent storage, it is often believed that they are an ideal place to store the Postgres Write-Ahead Logs (WAL) which are flushed to disk on every transaction commit. However, SSDs typically write data in 256 kilobyte chunks, meaning the small write operations that occur at every commit are not ideal for SSD drives, and might not even be flushed to permanent storage immediately. (Many SSD vendors have been vague about this behavior.) (FYI, Fusion-io drives are getting good reviews.) This paper explains the internal workings of SSD drives, and the article summary contains this warning:

We find that SSD performance and lifetime is highly workload-sensitive, and that complex systems problems that normally appear higher in the storage stack, or even in distributed systems, are relevant to device firmware.

In summary, SSD drives are not the panacea we hoped, or at least, not yet. A battery-backed disk drive controller is still the ideal solution for high performance at a reasonable cost. This Postgres email thread from November and December covers many of these details.

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Learning from NoSQL

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Having just blogged about NoSQL, I think the primary lesson the Postgres community can learn from NoSQL is that not everyone needs all our features, and if it can be easily accomplished, we should allow users to trade features for some of the NoSQL desired behaviors. We already do that in some cases:

However, there are a few things that will be difficult to allow:

I can't think of any new behaviors we could optionally allow for potential NoSQL users, but we should be looking to provide them where possible.

Update: One thing on our TODO list that might help potential NoSQL users is the implementation of a native JSON data type. JSON is used as a storage format for many NoSQL databases.

Update: This article is a review of several NoSQL and Web Service databases.

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Settling for NoSQL

Saturday, April 10, 2010

There is lots of buzz about NoSQL databases these days, and thanks to my attendance at Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference, I have learned more about them. I heard a talk about Cassandra, and another about MongoDB.

NoSQL databases differ in several ways from relational databases:

Few are excited about losing these valuable relational database features, but if your query response and infrastructure requirements can't be met by relational databases, and you can accept these limitations (think social media sites or search engines), NoSQL makes perfect sense.

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MVCC For Programming Languages

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) is the method used by Postgres to provide high read/write concurrency. You might not have heard of it, but if you have heard the Postgres locking behavior described as "readers don't block writers, and writers don't block readers", MVCC is what allows that behavior. Postgres was an early implementor of MVCC, but now most relations systems use it.

I attended the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference today and heard an interesting talk related to MVCC. It applied the ideas of MVCC (which allows for high concurrency) to the problem of parallel programming, which is becoming more necessary as massively multi-core systems become more common.

Specifically, the talk was about Clojure, by its author Rich Hickey. Clojure uses MVCC for the access and modification of program data, allowing parallel programming with no locking necessary in the client code; Closure does all the MVCC, and is ACID-compliant, except without durability ("D").

Traditional multi-core-enabled programming involves threads and explicit locking, just like pre-MVCC database systems, but Clojure requires none of that. It is as though a threaded program used Postgres to read and write its variables so it didn't need to do any locking, except the MVCC layer is moved into the client language. This is certainly a radical approach, but so was MVCC when it was initially implemented in database systems.

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Speaking in New York City

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

I am speaking at New York PostgreSQL Meetup Group on April 20th about Postgres replication solutions. This will be a much larger group than previous New York City Postgres meetings; 13 people have already registered.

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PG East: Slides

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

My slides from PG East are now online, and I will be giving a webcast of that presentation in late April. The presentation covers the new Postgres 9.0 features of hot standby and streaming replication: how they work, how to configure them, and their current limitations. The presentation also includes a live demonstration of setting up these features.

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PG East: Hotel

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

PG East was an unqualified success, as others have already blogged about. This conference might signal a change in the style for dedicated Postgres conferences. Postgres-specific conferences started only a few years ago, mostly at universities. I was one of the early proponents of having conferences at universities after seeing the success of FOSDEM. I felt the low admission cost made possible with inexpensive university facilities was critical in attracting the mostly-volunteer Postgres developers to the conference.

I am ready to rethink that suggestion having attended PG East. The conference cost only USD $125, and many things were definitely easier having the event in a hotel:

The ability to facilitate informal conversations is an important part of any event, and one of the things that excite attendees and keeps them coming back.

I thought the convenience of having everyone in a single hotel would be prohibitively expensive, but PG East proved that wasn't true. We did have significant business sponsorship of the event, but I found the sponsorship to be tasteful and it did not detract from the event. I wonder if other Postgres conferences will take this approach too.

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9.0 Release Notes Ready

Saturday, March 20, 2010

I have completed the Postgres 9.0 release notes and you can view them online. There will, of course, be many adjustments to the release notes before 9.0 final.

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PG East: What to Expect

Monday, March 15, 2010

The upcoming PG East Conference is in my home town, Philadelphia. The conference promises to be a new generation of Postgres conferences, and I want to highlight some of the changes that attendees can expect.

First, as I mentioned before, the hotel venue for this conference is much nicer than typical Postgres conferences. Also, it is located in an area of Philadelphia that is packed with great restaurants and shops.

The conference opens on Thursday, March 25, and the day includes two simultaneous talks every hour, including talks about migrating from MySQL, the use of Postgres at myYearbook.com, and hardware benchmarking. I bet the MySQL talk will be packed. There are many more business-oriented and end-user-focused talks than previous Postgres conferences.

Friday starts with a keynote by fellow Armenian Ed Boyajian, who is giving a non-technical talk challenging the community to expand its reach. The day also includes talks by a Forrester consultant (which I already mentioned), by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about how they use PostGIS to map airports, and, a sure favorite, a talk about the exciting new features in Postgres 9.0. A free party is planned for Friday night.

Saturday contains three or four simultaneous talks every hour, with many deeply technical talks. The big challenge will be picking which talks to attend. Sunday offers three different five-hour training sessions. I am hoping to offer tours of Philadelphia for visitors on Monday.

Why Attend: The conferences has created a web site about why you should attend, including pictures. Practically, while the talks are exciting, the real value of this conference is for you to see a new dimension of Postgres. By spending time with many of the Postgres community developers and other Postgres users, you can get a better understanding of what makes Postgres different, not only from proprietary databases, but also from other open source databases. (PGCon in Ottawa in May has even more developers.) Postgres developers might not look the most polished, but they have a passion for databases that sets them apart, and that will make you more confident in your choice to use Postgres. As I have heard many times before, you can't believe it until you've seen it.

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9.0 Release Notes Creation

Monday, March 15, 2010

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

Update2: I am over 50% done stage #4. 2010-03-17 22:00:48 GMT

Update3: I am done stage #4. 2010-03-18 21:50:36 GMT

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User Testimonial Video at PG East

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

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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9.0 Status Report

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Many 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).

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More Philadelphia Action

Friday, February 26, 2010

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.

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Why Blog?

Saturday, February 20, 2010

With 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.

Instant Messaging/IRC: This allows for quick feedback for dynamic tasks. I often use it to get a quick opinions before using other communication methods, or for dealing with complex problems that can't be easily phrased in an email.

Blog: I find this best for status reports and thought pieces. It reaches a large audience that is looking for that kind of information.

Wiki: The wiki is great for information that is both dynamic and needs to be retained, e.g. team projects, driver lists.

Documentation: This is for permanent information that should be seen by all Postgres users.

As you can see, this thought piece is best presented as a blog post.

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Python Driver Confusion

Saturday, February 20, 2010

A few weeks ago I learned there was serious confusion over the client-side Python drivers available for Postgres. This chart shows many Python drivers, but the recommended libpq-based driver, Psycopg, was listed on the chart as GPL licensed. This would require programs that use the driver to also be GPL licensed. However, the license is not actually GPL but a complicated hybrid license.

Fortunately, the Psycopg author has agreed to relicense his Python driver under the LGPL in the next release, and there is hope that Postgres developers will get involved to help add any missing features to the driver.

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Removal of Personal Copyrights

Friday, February 19, 2010

Postgres does not require copyright assignment from contributors because it is BSD licensed. Unlike the GPL, there is no enforcement component in the BSD license. When code and documentation are contributed to the project, the authors give the project the right to distribute their contributions under the BSD license. However, technically, authors also retain full rights to their contributions. Of course, there is little practical difference between retaining full rights and obtaining contributions under the BSD license.

Anyway, while all work submitted to Postgres is covered under the BSD license, the existence of individual copyright lines in our source code, e.g. © Joe Coder, makes company lawyers nervous, so we have a policy of avoiding such content. Unfortunately, this policy has been active only during the past five years and was not always universally enforced. For this reason, we occasionally have to ask authors for permission to remove their copyright lines, or in drastic cases, rewrite trivial code segments when the author cannot be contacted. We perform such cleanups periodically as the personal copyrights are brought to our attention, e.g. 2006, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010.

We believe we have finally removed all personal copyrights from our source code. Postgres 9.0 will be the first release of Postgres that has no individual copyright statements. Now, the existence of personal copyright statements is insignificant, but their complete removal will probably allow some corporate lawyers to sleep more soundly.

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Postgres University Course Material

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Leonard Shapiro of Portland State University has created some excellent Postgres university course material.

His first course, Introduction to Databases, teaches databases from a Postgres perspective. His higher-level course, Relational DMBS/Database Internals, covers many aspects of Postgres in greater detail than is covered in the Postgres manuals.

You might remember I taught a university class last year. I hope someday to able to teach a higher-level course that makes use of Professor Shapiro's material, with his permission, of course.

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Where Did My Error Come From?

Thursday, February 18, 2010

I am not sure people are aware that you can find the source code location of any generated server log message. When log_error_verbosity is set to 'verbose', additional details are output that can help diagnose errors. Specifically, I have added this to the Postgres 9.0 documentation:

VERBOSE output includes the SQLSTATE error code and the source code file name, function name, and line number that generated the error.

Here is some sample output: 

ERROR:  42P01: relation "lkjasdf" does not exist at character 15
LOCATION:  parserOpenTable, parse_relation.c:857
STATEMENT:  select * from lkjasdf;

Such information can help when reporting errors to the community, particularly if the error message is not in English.

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Caring for Your (PG) Introvert

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Many computer programmers are introverts because they have chosen the solitary job of creating programs that accomplish specific tasks. Open source developers are probably even more prone to be introverts because the (boring?) meetings, office chit-chat, and lunch outings are mostly gone, with the only communication being via email, instant messaging, twitter, and blogs. Open source social interaction is certainly more controlled than traditional communication.

This excellent article describes introverts as generally misunderstood:

Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion.

The Postgres community is probably filled with introverts, and that's to be expected, considering that our work does not have the kind of regular personal interaction that would keep extroverts happy. It is no surprise that introverts thrive in our community.

This also makes conferences even more valuable — it is a chance to be with other people who care about the same things we care about, and to tell some jokes. Of course, the conference talks are always good, but what stays with me after conferences is not the knowledge I have gained, but the people I have met and learned more about.

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Wanted: New Project Slogan

Friday, January 29, 2010

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.

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Postgres Is Hot In Philadelphia

Thursday, January 28, 2010

I was approached in the fall about speaking at various Philadelphia computer user group meetings. Now that I am home I have been able to speak at several, and it is clear there is greatly increased interest in Postgres here in the Philadelphia area, and I bet in other cities as well. For example, in January/February, I am speaking at:

I am also speaking in Albany (full event list), and of course the big event for March is the PG East 2010 conference, also in Philadelphia. This year the conference has been extended for four days, and one of those days is made up of tutorials, which is great for new Postgres users. I am giving one on Postgres administration, and there are two others being given at the same time. I think it is likely there will be a huge increase in the number of conference attendees compared to last year.

For those of you in other cities, you might want to contact your local computer user groups to see if they would be interested in hearing a talk about Postgres. There is a lot of renewed interest in what our community is doing.

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Threats to Postgres

Thursday, January 28, 2010

I have always thought there were three possible threats to Postgres:

The first issue is that our web domains are owned by a single individual, though others are able to modify the domain. The second involves patent attacks, which seems to be a risk for all software. The third item is a more general version of the skill siphoning / brain drain email thread I blogged about last year, but with a sinister goal of hiring away developers to work on anything but Postgres.

As Postgres becomes more widely adopted, these attacks become more likely. Are there other threats I have not listed? Are there more steps we can take to protect ourselves?

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Oops, Confusing Press Release

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Last week EnterpriseDB put out a press release with an inaccurate title. Instead of being titled, "EnterpriseDB Responds to EU Decision to Approve Oracle's Acquisition of MySQL", it was unfortunately titled "Postgres Community Responds ...". This has the potential to confuse journalists into thinking that Postgres development is not community controlled, and that's the last thing we want to happen at this point, with MySQL's problem in this area starkly highlighted. This dovetails well with the blog entry I posted a few weeks ago titled, "Don't Confuse Companies with Community".

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The Next Postgres Adoption Wave

Thursday, January 28, 2010

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 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.

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Postgres 9.0 Coming

Thursday, January 28, 2010

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.

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European Union Recognizes PostgreSQL

Thursday, January 21, 2010

It 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.

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Seeking Documentation Proofreading Assistance

Thursday, January 21, 2010

I mentioned two years ago that I was going to read through the Postgres documentation to see if I could improve it. Now, two years later, I have read through only 25% of the manual. (I will be making a commit to the "Administration" book in the next week.)

My new plan is to solicit volunteers to complete the proofreading of the entire manual. I have created a wiki describing the process and how to get involved. Amazingly, someone took responsibility for a book even before I announced the existence of the wiki. I have also emailed a few people who have offered proofreading assistance in the past.

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Don't Confuse Companies with Community

Monday, January 4, 2010

There have recently been several excellent blog posts by Postgres community members regarding the campaign by MySQL developers to block the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Unfortunately, I think a fatal mistake was made by the MySQL developers years ago when they equated the success of MySQL AB, the company, with the success of MySQL, the software. They are not the same, but, tragically, it is too late to undo that mistake.

I think the majority of Postgres developers understand the distinction between the success of their companies and the success of the PostgreSQL project. Most of us agree that the success of the PostgreSQL project is a purpose far greater than our individual or company successes. While the Postgres project will undoubtedly make mistakes in the future, confusing company success with community success will probably not be one of them.

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