Re: Pseudo-Off-topic-survey: Opinions about future of Postgresql(MySQL)?

Now that CA has open sourced Ingres what future do
you guess to Postgresql and MySQL?

Don't missunderstand me, I have been using Postgresql
for more than 3 years and developing apps against it
and all I got is possitive impressions, but comparing
the upcoming 8.0 (7.5) release with Ingres, it looks
that Ingres is much more advanced (clustering,
load-balancing, XML, ...) and the main advantage
Postgresql had in its open source nature looks to be
vanished. More one, CA looks really serious about
Ingres that now is a core tool in more of 100
derivates CA products, and it's said they had doubled
the number of Ingres developers. Also the new version
provides a great compatibility with Oracle and
"easify" Oracle to Ingres port. Is there any OBJETIVE
reason not to change to Ingres?

Thanks in advance for your comments!

Enrique Arizon Benito,

Software developer and Network Administrator
Daratel SL, http://www.daratel.com

Enrique Arizn wrote:
> Now that CA has open sourced Ingres what future do
> you guess to Postgresql and MySQL?
>
> Don't missunderstand me, I have been using Postgresql
> for more than 3 years and developing apps against it
> and all I got is possitive impressions, but comparing
> the upcoming 8.0 (7.5) release with Ingres, it looks
> that Ingres is much more advanced (clustering,
> load-balancing, XML, ...) and the main advantage
> Postgresql had in its open source nature looks to be
> vanished. More one, CA looks really serious about
> Ingres that now is a core tool in more of 100
> derivates CA products, and it's said they had doubled
> the number of Ingres developers. Also the new version
> provides a great compatibility with Oracle and
> "easify" Oracle to Ingres port. Is there any OBJETIVE
> reason not to change to Ingres?

Good question. We heard the same things when SapDB came out. SapDB was
moved into the MySQL AB company and renamed MaxDB. I don't think there
is any more community development of it, just like MySQL.

Basically, what we have is quality code and a vibrant community. Those
aren't easy to create. In fact, that's what makes open source powerful.

--
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e_arizon_benito(at)yahoo(dot)com (Enrique Arizón) commented:
> Now that CA has open sourced Ingres what future do
> you guess to Postgresql and MySQL?
>
> Don't missunderstand me, I have been using Postgresql for more than
> 3 years and developing apps against it and all I got is possitive
> impressions, but comparing the upcoming 8.0 (7.5) release with
> Ingres, it looks that Ingres is much more advanced (clustering,
> load-balancing, XML, ...) and the main advantage Postgresql had in
> its open source nature looks to be vanished. More one, CA looks
> really serious about Ingres that now is a core tool in more of 100
> derivates CA products, and it's said they had doubled the number of
> Ingres developers. Also the new version provides a great
> compatibility with Oracle and "easify" Oracle to Ingres port. Is
> there any OBJETIVE reason not to change to Ingres?

Let me point to an article just released in InfoWorld, directly
addressing this issue:
<http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/13/33OPcurve_1.html>

Check out the second paragraph:

"Then there are vendors that open up software, usually vintage code
that has no commercial value. IBM opened its Cloudscape Java DBMS, a
move that's a little late compared to Borland's opening of InterBase
and a little irrelevant next to powerful and widely used open DBMSes
such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, the latter being my current
favorite. Computer Associates' qualified open sourcing of Ingres is,
like Cloudscape and Microsoft's restrictive Shared Source Initiative
opening of parts of .Net and other properties, an apt illustration
of how selective corporate code charity is."

I have been watching different parts of the "computer biz" for
_years_, and I have seen plenty of projects using databases.

Oracle? Plenty. Microsoft SQL Server? Lots. Informix? Sure.
Sybase? I saw it chosen once, and I know one fellow who is presently
consulting at Morgan Stanley that tells me they are a big customer of
Sybase.

But in the last ten years, I have never once heard mention of Ingres
in a commercial context. I was aware of it via "University Ingres"
and because of knowing a little history, both of which came from
academia, not from the commercial world.

Consider:
- Monster.com shows 13 jobs mentioning Ingres;
- PostgreSQL gets you 55 hits.

I have to concur with Yager's characterization of the release.

SAP's release of SAP-DB last year is another pretty evident case of a
vendor opening up "vintage code with little commercial value." They
acquired it from Software AG a couple years ago, more than likely to
get them some leverage when negotiating licensing fees with Oracle.

They couldn't attract significant quantities of outside developers to
work on the "open source" release even though it has considerable
maturity and functionality.

Back to the Ingres question, it is _possible_ that the Ingres code
base may be usable / maintainable / improvable. It is by no means
guaranteed that this is so.

It seems much more likely that CA has concluded that they can't make
any more money off of Ingres, and that they're essentially providing a
way that any remaining shops that are _heavily_ invested in it have
some capability to self support if CA stops doing maintenance.

For all of the vendors that have been doing this sort of thing, there
is also likely some notion of "scorched earth" policy in mind. If
they can't make any money off their products, well, if they can do
something that can injure earning potential on the part of the the
leading vendor (e.g. - Oracle), they at least get _something_ out of a
retreat from the marketplace.

Note that, historically, a "scorched earth" policy probably most
notable as being the strategy Russian defenders used to fight back
those notable conquerors, Napoleon and Hitler. They didn't have the
military might to directly fight off the conqueror, so they burned
everything as they retreated. This left Stalingrad pretty much in
ruins, but the attacking armies were, shortly thereafter, nearly
destroyed by famine and frost.

I somehow doubt we'll see Oracle sales managers falling to quite that
kind of destruction, but it sure can't be enjoyable for them to see
others' database software getting steadily cheaper.

I wouldn't be shocked to see still more database products falling in
similar manner, although I don't expect to see many more closed source
DBs entering "open source form." If you watch carefully, you'll
notice that every one of the recently "open sourced" databases has
emerged from a company to whom they represented a secondary sort of
product. SAP _mostly_ sells R/3. CA sells plenty of other software
as does IBM.

Companies like Oracle, Informix, and Sybase, where the _only_ product
is the database, have no room to do this. If sales falter, the
company would fail before they could ever get a vital product "given
away."
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Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> writes:
> e_arizon_benito(at)yahoo(dot)com (Enrique Arizn) commented:
>> Is there any OBJETIVE reason not to change to Ingres?

> Back to the Ingres question, it is _possible_ that the Ingres code
> base may be usable / maintainable / improvable. It is by no means
> guaranteed that this is so.

We were asked exactly this question when Borland tossed Firebird (nee
Interbase) over the fence. I mind at least one prediction that Postgres
and MySQL would soon be, er, toast. Curiously enough, we're still here,
and Firebird has had only the most marginal uptake among those who
weren't already users of the commercial version.

Maybe the story for Ingres will be different, but I bet not. Keep in
mind that Ingres is a commercial derivative of the system that Prof.
Stonebraker abandoned when he decided to create Postgres. Sure, CA put
lots of development effort into what they got from Berkeley ... but a
lot of development effort has gone into Postgres since it left Berkeley,
too. There isn't any credible reason to assume that Ingres is a better
development foundation than Postgres, nor that it will attract more
development manpower than Postgres has.

> It seems much more likely that CA has concluded that they can't make
> any more money off of Ingres,

This is the absolute, undisputable, unvarnished bottom line. If they
thought they could still make a dime off it, they'd have kept it.
Since they don't think they can, what is a rational assumption about
the value of the code to the rest of us?

regards, tom lane

# This message was accidentally sent only to Bruce. It's pasted here
for comment from the rest of the list too :)

Folks,

While on the topic of Ingres and open source, I was wondering whether
there's interest in an effort to port some of the enterprise-grade
features from Ingres over to Postgres e.g. what Enrique mentioned
(clustering, load balancing, replication etc). I've never dabbled in
the internals of postgres before but I'd be willing to lend a hand in
any way to get those features into Postgres.

Shahbaz Javeed

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 22:29:09 -0400 (EDT), Bruce Momjian
<pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Enrique Arizón wrote:
> > Now that CA has open sourced Ingres what future do
> > you guess to Postgresql and MySQL?
> >
> > Don't missunderstand me, I have been using Postgresql
> > for more than 3 years and developing apps against it
> > and all I got is possitive impressions, but comparing
> > the upcoming 8.0 (7.5) release with Ingres, it looks
> > that Ingres is much more advanced (clustering,
> > load-balancing, XML, ...) and the main advantage
> > Postgresql had in its open source nature looks to be
> > vanished. More one, CA looks really serious about
> > Ingres that now is a core tool in more of 100
> > derivates CA products, and it's said they had doubled
> > the number of Ingres developers. Also the new version
> > provides a great compatibility with Oracle and
> > "easify" Oracle to Ingres port. Is there any OBJETIVE
> > reason not to change to Ingres?
>
> Good question. We heard the same things when SapDB came out. SapDB was
> moved into the MySQL AB company and renamed MaxDB. I don't think there
> is any more community development of it, just like MySQL.
>
> Basically, what we have is quality code and a vibrant community. Those
> aren't easy to create. In fact, that's what makes open source powerful.
>
> --
> Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
> pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
> + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
> + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your
> joining column's datatypes do not match
>

--
Shahbaz Javeed

Clinging to sanity, sjaveed(at)gmail(dot)com (Shahbaz Javeed) mumbled into her beard:
> # This message was accidentally sent only to Bruce. It's pasted here
> for comment from the rest of the list too :)
>
> Folks,
>
> While on the topic of Ingres and open source, I was wondering
> whether there's interest in an effort to port some of the
> enterprise-grade features from Ingres over to Postgres e.g. what
> Enrique mentioned (clustering, load balancing, replication etc).
> I've never dabbled in the internals of postgres before but I'd be
> willing to lend a hand in any way to get those features into
> Postgres.

It's an interesting idea, in general. There may be some roadblocks.
Notably:

a) Ingres code is not licensed under a BSD license, which probably
makes it unacceptable to include it with PostgreSQL.

b) The implementations of such "interesting things" within the Ingres
"code tree" may need to be modified substantially enough to make them
compatible with other databases as to make it worth starting over.

There may be some interesting ideas to look at; it wouldn't be
surprising if, when "thrown over the wall," there might be little left
:-(.
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