Sometimes you meet people so passionate about their product that they really deserve a platform. I had this feeling when I met Sean Doherty (@OpensourceDB) at #HPdiscover in Vienna last week. Sean is Vice President, Business Development for @EnterpriseDB.
EnterpriseDB is a PostgreSQL Database solution and was invited to HPdiscover as a finalist in the HP Mission Critical Innovation Awards in the category Best New Application.
EnterpriseDB just missed the award but because Sean is such a nice guy, the bloggers awarded him with the “Bloggers GreenIT award for 2nd Losers” at the dinner table (picture). I am so sure the smile on his face was genuine! 🙂
During the event I had the chance to talk to Sean a little deeper into his passion. Although I am really not the Database guy (almost all of my work involves iron as a base). I did have an angle to ask him some questions.
Q: For starters what is EnterpriseDB?
EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus Advanced Server is the only Open Source enterprise solution based on PostgreSQL. One could say that EnterpriseDB is for PostgrSQL what RedHat is to Linux.
Q: I know Microsoft SQL and sometimes we see Oracle DB. Why would I want to use EnterpiseDB?
PostgreSQL has already been recognized as the most advanced Open Source database worldwide. We just took it to the Enterprise level but without the costs one has to pay for the legacy vendors.
Q: you just hit a nerve: what about that cost savings?
Postgres Plus Advanced Server is sold under a
subscription model, and licensed per socket.
We do not ‘punish’ our customers for taking advantage of hardware advancements
or even use of virtualization.
Regardless of the number of cores, and no matter how many virtual
machines our customers are running, they will never pay more than the number of
physical sockets on the machine. This
provides a very low cost, predictable model for database costs.
Footnote Hans: this means if one would have 8 virtual EntepriseDB servers on 2 Hypervisors with each 2 sockets one would only purchase 4 licenses. And on the other side if one would have 16 hypervisors with 4 sockets but only 2 EnterpriseDB virtuals, one would only have to buy 2 licenses.
Q: Ok, I have the “getting it sold to the customer” angle. How about “getting it sold to the engineers”?
That’s a good question. Besides the fact that customers want low cost solutions they also will not sacrifice on performance. And certainly not on “ease-of-use”. In fact it is at this point EntepriseDB took it to the next level. We added 4 different area’s to the community version of PostgreSQL:
- TOOLS: on of the most recent launches was the Enteprise Manager, which is the first truly commercial grade
management, monitoring and development tool build for Postgres databases - SECURITY: PostgreSQL is already considered to be the most
secure database in the world, but we add more for our enterprise customers to
ensure the absolute highest levels of security which lead us to EAL2 of Common Criteria Certification - PERFORMANCE: lots of features such as DynaTune (to dynamically tune
the database server) and Infinite Cache (to store data in memory for staggering
performance gains on read-only or read-mostly workloads) are just some examples that are added in the Advanced Server. - ORACLE COMPATIBILITY: With our 7th generation technology, our
customers can migrate an application written to Oracle database over to
Postgres Plus Advanced Server with minimal code change to the application. This is very important for the HP Itanium customers now that Oracle went on a rant.