In the battle for database supremacy, it’s not just a struggle between commercial and open source interests. The open source interests go head-to-head, too.
Database vendor EnterpriseDB is raising the stakes in its fight against the likes of MySQL thanks to a new, bundled version of the popular open source PostgreSQL database.
“It’s the old theory that a rising tide raises all boats,” Derek Rodner, EnterpriseDB’s director of product strategy, told InternetNews.com. “We’re trying to raise the tide of Postgres and raise the ubiquity of the database.”
The new distribution, considered by EnterpriseDB to be a professional-grade distribution of the open source PostgreSQL database, is an easy-to-use preconfigured version of Postgres for developers, said Rodner. Among its enhancements are the inclusion of PostgreSQL 8.2.5 database, as well as a number of tools that Postgres users have, until now, had to find on their own.
Two of the tools baked into the distribution were previously only offered in the company’s proprietary EnterpriseDB Advanced Server database. The first, the Procedural Language Debugger, helps analyze and develop stored procedures, functions and triggers via a GUI interface.
The second, the MySQL-to-PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit, will make it simpler to migrate open source MySQL databases, including their entire data schema, to PostgreSQL.
Rodner foresees a “significant growth curve” with MySQL users being able to more easily migrate to PostgreSQL. To date, Rodner claims that the EnterpriseDB Postgres distribution has already had 6,500 downloads.
Though PostgreSQL has been around for more than 10 years, Rodner said that open source developers have generally supported it on their own without much, if any, help from external support organizations.
But EnterpriseDB, which makes money through a support model, realized that there is demand for PostgreSQL support. As a result, in August it launched Postgres Resource Center, which includes the first version of the EnterpriseDB Postgres distribution.
EnterpriseDB is also the company behind Sun’s Solaris support for PostgreSQL, which officially became part of Solaris in June 2006.
Though MySQL users represent an opportunity for Postgres, the larger overall opportunity for EnterpriseDB may well still be with migrations from Oracle’s namesake database.
For that market, EnterpriseDB has its Advanced Server product, which is also based on Postgres, although Advanced Server includes proprietary components to help achieve Oracle compatibility.
So far, EnterpriseDB has not offered an open source licensed tool to help Oracle users migrate to Postgres.
