IBM Takes Stake in Open Source Database Vendor

IBM Takes Stake in Open Source Database Vendor

For more than a decade, PostgreSQL has been a cornerstone of the open source database market. In recent years, EnterpriseDB has emerged as a leading vendor supporting and driving PostgreSQL forward.

It will now continue its efforts thanks in part from a little help from IBM. EnterpriseDB is also re-branding and expanding its PostgreSQL efforts to take even more direct aim at its rival MySQL on the open source side and Oracle on the proprietary side.

IBM is joining EnterpriseDB's C round of venture financing which in total raises $10 million for the open source database vendor. Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, noted that IBM's was one of four groups participating (including Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, Valhalla Partners) in this current financing round. To date, EnterpriseDB has raised $37.5 million in venture financing.

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I'm certainly happy to see corporate interest in PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL has been my RDBMS of choice since the 6.x days, but I'm no stranger to MySQL. MySQL, far inferior to PostgreSQL (in my opinion), gets all of the money and corporate attention, and PostgreSQL gets jack.
*/

Astor told InternetNews.com that IBM called EnterpriseDB and the discussions went from there. Astor added that the discussions with IBM pre-dated the $1 billion acquisition of MySQL by Sun earlier this year.

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It sure sounds fishy, but I believe them. It's entirely likely that both Sun and IBM were looking to take stake in the open source RDBMS world at around the same time.
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Astor argued that EnterpriseDB has emerged as a leading direct competitor to Oracle's proprietary database and IBM wants a piece. IBM of course has its own proprietary database in DB2, which also competes against both Oracle and PostgreSQL.

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This confuses me. I can see how Sun might be willing to "take sides" with MySQL (in the sense of aligning with an open source database) as they do not develop/sell database software. They do have a cozy ISV relationship with Oracle, but after all, they're merely using it to sell Sun systems and software. Here we have IBM giving money for development of PostgreSQL when they have their own established, enterprise-grade RDBMS.

Not that I'm complaining, of course.
*/

Postgres Plus takes the core PostgreSQL database and bundles in additional components to make it easier to install and deploy. Postgres Plus Advanced Server adds in additional closed source Oracle compatibility extensions to PostgreSQL.

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It appears that a lot of these add-ons are just pre-packaged third-party solutions; most are open-source. Here's a quick list of features:
Postgres Studio ("built on" the pgAdmin utility)
Debugging support
Geospatial functionality (looks to be the add-ons right out of $PG_SRC/contrib)
GridSQL Parallel Query
MySQL migration
Performance enhancements
Slony-I replication (single-writer/many-readers)
Oracle compatibility

The one thing to complain about: it doesn't appear that any of these enhancements by EnterpriseDB will make their way back upstream into the open source, community version of PostgreSQL. If it does, there is little to no information stating as such.
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