News

EnterpriseDB’s Database Rolls into General Availability

• By John K. Waters
• August 23, 2005

EnterpriseDB is on a roll. The company won an award in the best database solution category at LinuxWorld and announced the general availability of EnterpriseDB 2005 in only a little more than 2 months after emerging from stealth mode. The company says 20,000 copies of its DB were downloaded during the public beta period.

Based on the open-source DBMS PostgreSQL, EDB05 is an enterprise-class relational database management system designed to support update-intensive, high-volume applications. PostgreSQL has been around in one form or another for about 20 years. It emerged from the POSTGRES project, a database research project directed by Professor Michael Stonebraker at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1980s. Stonebraker had also led the groundbreaking Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System (INGRES) project, which, along with System R from IBM, revolutionized database systems by allowing data to be accessed through a high-level language. (“POSTGRES” stands for “post-INGRES.”)

With EDB05, EnterpriseDB has set out to improve on the venerable open-source DBMS with enterprise-targeted features, including compatibility with many applications written for Oracle and SQL Server databases. This capability is implemented through compatible SQL syntax, data types, triggers and native stored procedures.

EnterpriseDB takes PostgreSQL to another level, says Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB’s CEO, by offering an alternative to other open-source systems, such as MySQL and Firebird, and by competing with proprietary systems venders such as Oracle, Sybase, IBM and Microsoft.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of hundreds of staff years of work,” Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB’s CEO, told DataTrends. “And it’s important for us to be cognizant of that heritage--and we are. Our job is to enhance that technology to compete in a commercial environment.”

The company plans to contribute all general quality improvements back to the PostgreSQL code base immediately, with no restrictions, Astor says.

Winning the LinuxWorld award provided a kind of validation of the company’s basic strategy, Astor added. The judges based their votes on several criteria, including price performance, conformation to standards, supported platforms, data storage efficiency, usability and ease of data backup.

In a related announcement, the company disclosed it is leading the creation of a PostgreSQL community initiative to develop ANSI-standard stored procedures and triggers for PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB will sponsor the project for PostgreSQL 8.2, helping PostgreSQL remain the most ANSI-compatible database in the world. More information about this initiative is available in the PostgreSQL discussion forums.

For more information, go to: EnterpriseDB.