Winds of Change

Over the last week or so I’ve notice several articles that all loosley fall under the umbrella of a general move and conversion toward the PostgreSQL database system. The early radar comes fo course from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogosphere blogosphere], where [http://www.addingunderstanding.com/node/959 a passing post] made mention of [http://www.stackworks.net/view.php/irm/index.html Stackworks IRM’s] decision to rewrite thier entire program from php/my$ql to python/postgresql. A slight cause of concern for the poster, but very cool in my eyes (incidentally I’d love to heard details on thier justification for the switch, to see if it’s what I think it is). I then happened upon another seemingly [http://leonbrooks.blogspot.com/2005/10/dark-side-of-force-loses-another-one.html harmless post] that points out another conversion, this one from a m$ $ql $erver user to [http://www.postgresql.org postgresql]. That decision was based on, as the author puts it, that ”PostgreSQL’s stored procedures support is if anything considerably better than MS-SQL-Server’s”. Again quite cool. Now, a few blog posts do not a revolution make, but then I came across this news item: [http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7615 Bugzilla 2.20 has been released]. Why is this significant? This version finnally includes “official” experimental PostgreSQL support. This is significant because [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/index.cgi people] have been running postgresql powered bugzilla installations for years, but to that point it has taken years to get the bugzilla core project to accept postgresql support into the mainline code. It’s clearly a step in the right direction, and a sign of postgresql making more inroads into classifcly my$ql oriented projects. (Bonus points for anyone who downloads/imports/tests bugzilla with pg 8.1) So we see this trend pass from the blogosphere into the larger open source projects and then into the tech press and more traditional software development companies. Specifically [http://www.infoworld.nl/idgns/bericht.phtml?id=00256F6C005C22FC002570A80078B430 this article] from infoworld which outlines Emic Networks Corp.’s plan to rename itself Continuent and move from a my$ql oriented company to a more general database software company, offering products for both my$ql and postgresql, and eventually sybase and m$ $ql $erver. This is good for postgresql on a basic level because this Emic just happens to offer database clustering software, something that is certainly a hot topic within the postgresql community. But it’s even more important as a sign that companies are begining to see that being in the my$ql market is not sonoymous with being in the open source database market, and thats good for everyone, whether you are on postgresql or [http://www.sqlite.org sqlite] or whatever.