I found the recent interview with Bruce Momjian (founder, lead architect, PostgreSQL) rather interesting. From it I took away:
- PostgreSQL has stringent quality assurance. This is because there isn’t the “luxury of putting out a bad release”. He mentions that in the world of open source, there is zero tolerance for things that don’t work; I however can find many examples contradicting this line of thinking. Release engineering is largely dependent on humans and they do make mistakes.
- “People are more confident with us that some of the commercial databases.” I believe this largely is how your company is run – tech-oriented or suit-oriented. Worse if you’re suit-oriented and largely public. Investors and upper management need to blame someone when things go wrong, and thats why support services are so great in the open source world. Accountability is key. The ability to fix customers problems is key. Going off on a tangent, Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell and OpenOffice.org hacker extraordinaire basically said:
Ubuntu, claiming to ship and support OpenOffice.org, it’s a total joke – they have a part-time packager. At Mandriva, for example, the OpenOffice.org packager is a self-described ‘not a C++ programmer’. So how you can then go and say ‘we’ll support you’… Novell, at least, has people across the board working on the codebase, with a good understanding of lots of issues.
- Bruce mentions evolution – from stopping PostgreSQL crashing, to performance tuning, to enterprise features. He reckons that 8.2 is Enterprise Ready, and 8.3 and forward is going to include “revolutionary features that go beyond things you can’t do with other databases”.
- My favourite quote:
“If you look in the next five years, PostgreSQL will be a poster child for databases period,” he said. “There is not really another database that’s enhancing at the speed of PostgreSQL, so what that would look like is hard to say.”
- Pretty bold statement, eh? No roadmaps, like most open source projects. I actually think that’s a plus point, because roadmaps suit suits, but are completely inaccurate most of the time.
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