Ever since Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL, the most common question  that I had to answer  was "Is PostgreSQL dead at Sun?".  This question was not only raised from just PostgreSQL contributors but also other Sun Employees and  potential customers who may not even know that Sun actually sells PostgreSQL support services. 

This question will be further fueled with Josh Berkus's departure. (Josh, we will miss you.)  I admit from the period between the announcement of MySQL acquisition till recently, I too had my own doubts. But as Sun enters it new Fiscal Year FY09, and the clear directions from Management has given the right positive goals to the Sun PostgreSQL Team which will lead to Positive Growth, Self Sustaining model and …

I was browsing the web on this lazy Sunday afternoon and ran across a good article on the Rarest Words blog. The author was trying to get Django installed and running with Postgres. From the author's own admissions, he is not a Postgres fanatic.

Well, this and last year I hear everywhere that PostgreSQL is the way to go and that usage of mySQL in 2008 makes people puke… But without any real arguments (besides "Postgres is the way to go").

After some not so compatible errors with these not so compatible databases, the author did get it working and ran some benchmarks. Postgres did not turn out faster than MySQL. If you ask anyone in the Postgres community which database is faster, they will say Postgres. Ask anyone in the MySQL community and there's no telling what …

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Sun just announced MySQL Workbench, a new database design tool for MySQL developers and DBAs. I'm a data modeling tool junkie. I like to play with any I can get my hands on. I've used almost every modeling tool that's been built. My all time favorite is probably Erwin.

I decided to download MySQL Workbench and give it a try. Since I was playing with it, I figured I should write about it and while I am writing about it, I might as well write about a couple of other tools, that I have personally used, that you might like.

TOAD …

It is that time of the year when many PostgreSQL fans gather in Ottawa, Canada for PGCon 2008 next week. This will be my first visit to PGCon in Ottawa. Earlier this year I had presented two sessions "PostgreSQL and Benchmarks" and "Best Practices of PostgreSQL on Solaris" at PostgreSQL Conference 2008 East in Maryland. Thanks to that visit, this time I might recognize many people by face this time around.

Sun is a Gold Sponsor at PGCon 2008. There will be quite a bit of presence from Sun in PGCon. Josh, Max, Robert, Magne, Zdenek, Jim, Mayuresh et all will be present out there.

Josh Berkus is doing a tutorial on  "GUCs: A Three Hour Tour" on …

I briefly mentioned in my earlier post that OpenSolaris binary is probably just a chapter of a book. To really understand how the benefits of OpenSolaris lets look at the needs of a typical Software Application

A Software Application at a very base level of being a usage product needs the following:

1. Operating System: First and foremost which generally nobody wants to rewrite unless there is something missing that you really need. Generally it is part of "Systems requirement" which defines the operating systems supported.
2. Method of distributing the software: Either via CD, DVD or via internet downloads
3. Installer: Installing the software on the target machine
4. Patching/Upgrading: Upgrading the software when new versions are released (specially with security updates)

So how does OpenSolaris solve this problems?

Lets start with (1). For the first time that I am aware, …

OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 is now available for download.  Its quite a departure from traditional Solaris. Why? because the CD that one will be downloading is probably just a chapter in the full book. To understand the full picture one will have to really look at the bigger picture on how the whole deployment model is now changing. The full scope is not my topic of discussion but I probably want to focus on probably couple of pieces today in order to demonstrate on how to create a PostgreSQL OpenSolaris LiveCD.

In order to create a custom LiveCD, its probably best to start with OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 installation though it is not necessary as it can be done on Solaris Express installations also but needs pkg(5) to be installed. But the two things really required to create a custom LiveCD, you need one kit to download and a repository to access. The kit to download …

Lets start at the point where you have just installed OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and have logged in using your primary userid on the system.

First thing to do is install the packages for PostgreSQL and MySQL on OpenSolaris OS 2008.05. Right click on the desktop and select "Open Terminal" to start a terminal session. Use "su" to assume the root userid. (The primary user already has root role however some programs still explicitly check for userid of root and hence needed to avoid unexpected surprises.)

Verify pkg is able to communicate with the IPS repository.

# pkg search -r postgres …

besides a community ?

Some people think that apart from a community and users you also need an infrastructure to support these users.

Murray ignited the discussion by pointing us to the fact that PostgreSQL doesn't have a bugzilla to report an track issues.

Different projects have different approaches. Both the kernel, Drupal and MySQL have build their own infrastructure. Others choose Sourceforge for their projects.

What's your approach ?

Tolven Inc an Open Source Healthcare Solutions provider recently carried out a benchmark using PostgreSQL on Solaris 10 using ZFS on Sun Fire X4600.  The Benchmark report is now available on their website.

The size of the  single database instance using PostgreSQL 8.2.6 (32-bit) peaked at 474GB with the largest table having more than 500 million rows. More information is in the report.

Tolven's  setup guide for developers which includes information about PostgreSQL  setup is also available on their website.

As Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 is launched along with the Open Application Services solution which includes PostgreSQL, the talk I gave at PostgreSQL East 2008 on "Best Practices with PostgreSQL on Solaris" might be helpful for many new users.

If there are questions let me know.