LIFE AFTER
GREAT BRIDGE		  
  by Nancy Cohen      
 

e-Open talks to PostgreSQL core developer Bruce Momjian after his exit as corporate VP of a company that collapsed.

  
     
  While most if not all Open Source community citizens need no big introduction, Bruce Momjian is that PostgreSQL guy. He was the co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and one of the core developers of PostgreSQL. He’s the one who wrote the book PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts (Addison, Wesley) released in 2000 and published in Japanese and German translations earlier this year. He is the one who has worked on the PostgreSQL for the last four years, helping his development team to fill in the missing parts to put PostgreSQL on track to be on a par with the likes of Oracle in the near future and maintaining the to-do list for the site. http://www.ca.postgresql.org/docs/momjian/TODO.html

 Until September of this year, Momjian was also known as an Open Source pioneer who went ‘corporate,’ joining Great Bridge LLC as the vice president of database development. So when Great Bridge, which launched a commercial version went under, the questions remained: Not only whither Momjian? but whither those who pursue the PostgreSQL holy grail as a future database of choice for the enterprise?

Great Bridge had managed to attract a number of its core programmers along with Momjian to steer PostgreSQL’s development. When Momjian first began his Great Bridge stint, he told Open magazine that he had made the decision to join Great Bridge because, though the developer group had a great development model, they needed a marketing umbrella to push them forward into the corporate heartland. While Open Source groups by definition are not vulnerable to the comings and goings of corporate busts, we still wanted to ask if the demise of this core business entity promoting Open Source database alternatives would impede community development in any way. Momjian, who has since taken a post at Tokyo-based Software Research Associates and continues to promote and work on PostgreSQL, talks to e-Open about the technology:

Q: Did the development site feel much disruption because of Great Bridge going out of business?

Momjian: It had minimal influence. PostgreSQL has had a first class infrastructure since work first began five years ago, thanks to Marc Fournier. The infrastructure has prevented disruptions from delaying the project. A lot of people in the Open Source community may not fully understand the importance of infrastructure, because when you don’t have it, any hiccup hampers the entire group. But Great Bridge’s demise has minimal influence on the community. Marketing—that is the only thing that I felt tough to replace.

Q: When we last spoke earlier this year, I had asked you about replication and PostgreSQL. You told me how Great Bridge was doing research and thought Postgres-R as a good replication solution, though no coding had yet begun. Any further developments?

Momjian:  Somebody will pick up the ball. Replication work stopped but we’ll pick it up.

Q: The PostgreSQL development goal is to get on par with enterprise-level database systems in features and functionalities that corporate environments demand. How far away from that goal are you?*

Momjian:  At Great Bridge, we felt we needed another year or two. But if you look at the speed to which we are improving PostgreSQL, other database options look as if they’re standing still. For some time, MySQL carried the advantage of speed, but PostgreSQL is improving very rapidly there. We are not now on parity with commercial database solutions but you will soon see something different.

Q: MySQL AB and NuSphere of course deal with another technology, MySQL. But how does the fall of Great Bridge affect the Open Source database vendor competitive picture vis a vis PostgreSQL Inc. and Red Hat, now that the latter promotes Red Hat Database powered by PostgreSQL?

Momjian:  When you are selling software of this nature to corporations, you need to show you have people who are capable to do support, who can do some of the administration to make it easier for the business customer to use PostgreSQL. Red Hat needed to move up the chain into larger-scale enterprises and they knew the way to do this was through service support offerings like PostgreSQL, with tools to match. I know it’s been said that Open Source business models depending on revenue from support don’t go well but, in the database world, if you can deliver support any time, any  day guaranteed, you can make money. As for PostgreSQL Inc., Great Bridge never really saw them as competition. We saw them as complementing what we were doing. We were shooting for large corporate customers at higher pricing points.

Click to learn why The META Group's Charlie Garry finds Open Source database system adoption to be moving at glacial speed.