Postgresql has definitely been gaining momentum as more and more companies support it. This interview goes over the work that has gone into version 8.0. Fujitsu is the 1000 lbs (US$10.1 billion) new contributor. Other contributors include Red Hat, Afilias, Software Research Associates, Inc., 2nd Quadrant, and Command Prompt Inc as well as the database company Pervasive Software.
Postgresql is the DNS backbone for the .net and .org domains. The only big features missing are fully integrated multi-master replication (Slony already does master-slave and slony2 is doing this) and some features on the backup.
Oxford University is scrapping oracle and moving everything to postresql in '05.
One of my favorite features is that you can write your triggers in python.
In terms of scalablity they have done a lot of testing on systems with 4,000-4,800 transactions per minute and improving large system performance. It wouldn't surprise me if Sun picks up Postgresql as a project if Oracle and IBM keep up their difections to linux.
The real driver I think will be that Postgresql now runs in windows so the PHP community will be more likely to use it for development work. The Admin GUI has come a long way as well.
The other thing I think would help Postgresql is a migration tool from sqlite. So that developers could prototype their app in sqlite and then easily move to postgresql when they need to scale up.
I think that someone should try to get SAP donate developer resources - as this project is in their interest.
I find that Oracle and DB2 dbas typically dismiss Postgresql as lacking "Enterprise" features. I feel like most of these features are irrelivant if you have very good middleware developers who write quality applications.
Banks lived for years and years on flat file databases and less features rich database server (Oracle 6.x eg) and didn't have features like Integrity constraints, stored procedures and triggers. Did the banks have larger outages or have a lower return on equity due to this? No - smart developers made apps that worked.
Posted by Anthony at February 3, 2005 11:51 AM | TrackBack