UPDATE - EnterpriseDB open-sources GridSQL

IDG News Service — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:24:51 -0700

EnterpriseDB plans to announce Tuesday that it is open-sourcing GridSQL, its grid product for data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) applications, under the GPLv2 license. The product works alongside EnterpriseDB's main offerings, a PostgreSQL-based open-source database and an application server.

In addition, moving forward, EnterpriseDB will have some backing from IBM, which is becoming a minority shareholder of the company.

"We view the investment as an important move because it provides IBM the opportunity to continue to participate in the open source environment and community through a variety of ways," IBM said in a statement Monday. "The move is consistent with our experience with Linux, Apache and Eclipse and previous investments we've made in other companies, including Red Hat and Novell."

GridSQL, and products like it, allow users to scale up database performance by adding more servers to a grid configuration, and then running queries in parallel across the pool.

"We're hoping to see GridSQL become the default way enterprises address parallel query when they use an enterprise-quality, open- source database," said CEO Andy Astor.

In addition, EnterpriseDB announced the release of its Postgres Plus 8.3 open-source database. Features such as advanced replication capabilities and its parallel query engine provide "massive" scalability, EnterpriseDB said. Past versions of the product were called EnterpriseDB Postgres.

The company is also releasing Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3, an update to a product formerly known as EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, which, like its predecessor, can run Oracle applications with little or no need to change code, according to EnterpriseDB.

The database and server products are available under commercial license for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Subscriptions start at US$995 per socket, with a maximum of two sockets.

As for the company's decision regarding GridSQL, it will likely play well in the midmarket, according to Noel Yuhanna, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"Even SMBs are dealing with terabytes of data" and are realizing they have to look at business intelligence more seriously, he said. "SMBs are just a smaller scale of enterprise. ... They don't really have a different requirement, but they have a smaller requirement."

But the high costs of offerings from larger vendors such as Teradata have been prohibitive for such firms, Yuhanna noted. "Now with EnterpriseDB and GridSQL coming into a lower-cost platform, it makes sense for these enterprises," he said.

Open-sourcing GridSQL makes sense for EnterpriseDB as well, because grid computing is a complex and still-evolving technology, and input from a community of developers will likely improve the product, beyond merely driving up adoption.

EnterpriseDB competes with a variety of other open-source database vendors, from fellow small players like Greenplum to Sun Microsystems, which recently bought mySQL.