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Sun Microsystems Databases Programming Software IT

Sun Announces Support for PostgreSQL 283

Posted by CowboyNeal from the open-for-business dept.
jadavis writes "Sun announces 24x7 support for PostgreSQL on Solaris 10. From the article: 'Today Sun announced that it will be integrating the Postgres open source data base into the Solaris 10 OS and providing world-wide 24x7 support for customers who wish to develop and deploy open source database solutions into their enterprise environments. Sun is working with the PostgresSQL community to take advantage of the advanced technologies in the Solaris 10 OS, such as Predictive Self-Healing, Solaris Containers and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).'"
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Sun Announces Support for PostgreSQL More

Sun Announces Support for PostgreSQL

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  • Progressive... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18, 2005 @05:06AM (#14061203)
    First Apache, now Postgres?... What's next, will solaris understand cursor keys? Ship with BASH? What's the world comming to?

    • Re:Progressive... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pedestrian crossing ( 802349 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @05:11AM (#14061223) Homepage Journal

      What's next, will solaris understand cursor keys? Ship with BASH? What's the world comming to?

      Solaris has shipped with bash for quite a while now...

    • Re:Progressive... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think it's shipped with bash since Solaris 7. It's definitely been there since Solaris 8 (/bin/bash).

      If only Sun's PHBs had listened to the engineers, PostgreSQL could have been shipping with Solaris at least two years ago.

      Sun's PHBs move in mysterious ways.

      • Re:Progressive... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @08:49AM (#14061917) Journal
        Sun's PHBs move in mysterious ways.

        Actually, they don't. What is going on, is a inside fight.

        There is a group there that fears MS (rightly so). They think that dealing with MS is dealing with the devil. They really want to crush them at all costs. This group pushes Sun towards the OSS path. The group is also responsible for the approach with OpenOffice as well as Java. Problem is, that MS won the desktop sometime ago, and is entrenched. Taking it back is a very difficult thing to do. As to server space, They do not see MS is taking from them (probably right). That group is helping linux.

        The other group sees Linux taking from them (rightly so). Linux has been eating up server space. They are taking away from Solaris. This group did open solaris as a way of winning very lucrative support contracts and hopefully to sell hardware. One of the keys here is to try and make Solaris more like Linux. So they are trying to adopt a number of OSS and claim that they deserve the OSS worlds support. What is interesting is that they are starting to support BSD (I am not sure if they are looking to take it over or as support against Linux; more like a long-term trojan horse).

        So what does it mean? That Sun is like any other large firm. There are multiple fractions playing games in house and McNeally lets it go.

        • Re:Progressive... (Score:2, Informative)

          by donuthole ( 704687 )
          I'm sorry, I don't often reply on Slashdot, but I have to reply this because it's so pointedly wrong. Sun didn't open source solaris [opensolaris.org] to win support contracts and sell hardware. They open sourced it to generate a community around it and to increase developer and academic interest. The engineers working on Solaris have been wanting to open source Solaris for ages to try and increase adoption. I'm on the OpenSolaris engineering team, so I'm pretty certain I know what's going on around me here.

          • Re:Progressive... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by WindBourne ( 631190 )
            Yes, no doubt you want it open. You are an engineer. Lets be honest. You are sitting there watching what Linux and StarOffice/OpenOffice is doing and loving what you see. While I am not part of Sun, I have dealt with Sun and have a few friends there (if you are really on the team, say howdy to semery/weasel).

            But, this thread was describing Sun's PHBs. Your PHB's finally agreed to open this not because they found relgion, but because they want sales. To say otherwise would be disingenuous.

            BTW, That is no

        • Sun and BSD (Score:3, Interesting)

          by alexhmit01 ( 104757 )
          Sun working with BSD makes sense from a historical perspective as well. The original Sun OS was build on BSD, as Bill Joy, the technical founder was a big guy in the BSD world, and left to start Sun on BSD technology. Sun migrated from BSD to AT&T Unix after several releases.

          As a result, their are probably elements of a BSD culture in Sun.

          In addition, the GPL space makes it harder for a traditional software player to compete. The GPL makes sense for PURE hardware players (of which Sun is not, and in
          • First off, I have worked for IBM and HP.

            BSD is corporate friendly, iff you want the same game that has all but destroyed the unix market. That is, the ability to close off the work from your competitors as soon as it is in your advantage. Personally, the whole fiasco over unix taught me that it is a losing situation and one that I will no longer do. GPL works better for suppliers as it prevents anybody from being able to take away and not give. It is also better from consumers as it prevents one company

  • More links (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChrisRijk ( 1818 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @05:14AM (#14061233)
    A kinda generic news page about the Postgres announcement:
    http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/news/111705.js p [sun.com]

    More about Postgres specifically:
    http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/postgres.jsp [sun.com]

    • Sun is working with the PostgreSQL community.
    • Postgres for Solaris will be included with every copy of Solaris 10, with full support available from Sun
    • Support for Solaris 10 and Postgres will be less expensive than support for Postgres and standard commercial Linux offerings.
    • Many of many customers enterprise database needs can now be served with free and open source databases.
    • The open source database is only one component of Sun's open source strategy that aims to provide customers with breakthrough new technologies based on open standards.
    • Sun will provide feature-specific optimizations, such as DTrace providers, service manifests and Solaris Containers capabilities, enabling Postgres for Solaris to take advantage of key Solaris 10 technologies.
    • Enhancements in Postgres for Solaris will be contributed to the PostgreSQL open source community.

  • It can see into the future (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gringer ( 252588 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @05:24AM (#14061254)
    ...the advanced technologies in the Solaris 10 OS, such as Predictive Self-Healing...

    Yes, this is a technology that is able to predict when breaks will happen, and carry out the repairs before the problems ever surface.
    • You might call "Predictive Self-Healing" an "oracle".

      Who knew that the HAL-9000 ("2001" reference) would actually be made by SUN Microsystems?

      SUN has made some great moves (Opteron-based workstations and servers), great new UltraSparc (T1) processors, a rock solid OS that they have open sourced (Solaris 10), and now their alignment with PostgresSQL. I am truly impressed. It looks like they have made all the right moves. Perhaps they have used SGI (Silicon Graphics) as an object lesson as to "what NOT to

  • Much bigger than just Postgres (Score:5, Interesting)

    by axonis ( 640949 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @05:34AM (#14061284)
    This announcement is much bigger than just Postgres Integration, it also includes Xen virtualisation and Red package application support. This will surely make Solaris more attractive than RedHat now on x86-64

  • An honest question. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @06:00AM (#14061351) Homepage Journal
    Who uses Solaris 10?
    • The #opensolaris channel on irc.freenode.net has 116 people in it right now (6 AM EST). While the majority are AFK it shows there are people interested in it.

      My past beef with Sun was the shoddy x86 support (remember Solaris 8 x86 that aptly deserved the moniker slowaris?) and negative approach to Linux. Since their recent adoption of AMD X86-64, less doublespeak on Linux, and OSS-ing of Solaris though, I'm willing to take another look.

      Maybe they are starting to wake up and smell the coffee......java per
    • Who uses Solaris 10?

      People trying to do stuff?
      • From a commercial point of view Solaris 10 isn't in the roadmap yet - looking at our customers it's evenly divided between solaris 8 and 9 (couple of solaris 6) and zero solaris 10.

        The shift will probably start happing in the next year or so... then we'll have to buy another sparc box to support it (any excuse...)
        • I've seen relatively few Solaris 10 systems in production, but most new development work on Solaris is for 10. So far 10 looks like the most actively planned for version of Solaris I can remember.
        • You are right. Most Solaris admins don't jump to the next best release when it comes out. It usually takes a long time to go from one version to the next. Many even skip one. I, for example, am running Solaris 8 on all my production boxes. We just started planning for a migration to Solaris 10 while skipping 9. The move from 2.6 to 8 took a couple of years and my guess is that the move from 8 to 10 will take that long again.

          If it wasn't for DTrace, Zones, and ZFS I would stick with Solaris 8 for even longe

          • Stick with an OS (Solaris 8) that is approaching EOL? That might be OK from a sysadmin perspective but not from a business perspective. Plus, Solaris 10 is going to support your Solaris 8 apps and most of the scripts even. It is also a lot faster, more secure as well as what you mentioned. The BIG issue is that a lot of small-to-medium ISVs have not "qualifed" thier apps with Solaris 10 and will certify they work which is something that concerns a lot of IT Managers. Expect the pace of certs to increase.
            • You might want to check out the support matrix [sun.com]. Solaris 7 is still being supported for more than two years and no dates have been announced for Solaris 8 and up.

              I am not saying that I am going to run Solaris 8 forever. I am just saying that I am speeding up the transition to Solaris 10 only because of the features it offers. They make my life as sysadmin much easier.

              • It might not be the best strategy to force moves to Solaris 10 but it is coming. Newer Sun H/W (i.e. Niagra, Galaxy) will support only Solaris 10 so as your Sun equipment is EOLed that too will force you to move or go unsupported or make a lifetime buy and support yourself.

    • Re:An honest question. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @07:07AM (#14061528)

      Who uses Solaris 10?

      I assume you mean "uses it instead of Linux", what with this being Slashdot. How about people who've benchmarked it against Linux and found Solaris to scale better and more smoothly? Some of us like having beefy Sparc or Opteron SMP machines that perform predictably with Solaris, rather than the erratic behaviour we've seen with Linux on SMP Intel hardware. The 2.6.x Linux kernel has also been a serious disappointment in terms of reliability, a definite step back from 2.4.x.

      • How about people who've benchmarked it against Linux and found Solaris to scale better and more smoothly?

        interesting. Do you remember when Sun was going to release OpenSolaris and they held back. The reason they held back was that internal benchmarking found that Linux 2.6 was killing everything that they had. They had to redesign and recode their networking (according to a friend of mine who did this, they borrowed heavily from the OSS world for ideas; but he swears it will beat them for a while). In addi

      • Re:An honest question. (Score:3, Informative)

        by C_Kode ( 102755 )
        I've found that Solaris 10 has so many problems that I wouldn't dream of using it even in a box at my house that I test on. It's proven to be trash and not worth the ascii text it's written in.

        Now, we are in the same boat. I made several claims that one OS sucks yet I didn't list any references to support my claim.

        That force me to discount your entire statment and all creditability.

        Solaris 10 is a very nice OS, but my Oracle 10g RAC runs quite nicely on RHEL3 x86-64. (SMP Opterons (DBs) and SMP Xeon (app
      • Actually, I'm insane enough to use it on my laptop with no other OS. OpenSolaris looks to be very promising, and it's a stable, nice system. I used to use Debian and FreeBSD, and so have found pkg-get to be a great replacement for apt-get and ports. And zones rock...I can run Tomcat and host webapps (my host doesn't support JSP or servlets) in the background without any visible effect.

    • It's too bad you got modded "flamebait" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by IANAAC ( 692242 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @09:42AM (#14062272)
      It IS an honest question.

      Our shop is mostly Solaris (8) and RHEL with Oracle 9i. We're currently looking at upgrading our Solaris boxes to Solaris 10.

      The problem? Oracle 9i is not supported on Solaris 10. It's supported on RHEL and earlier versions of Solaris.

      So at the moment, it's not doable for us. But from the tinkering I've done with Solaris 10, it's actually pretty cool. I've got it running on an Ultra 10 under my desk and have been evaluating ot for a couple of months now. I'll tell you it's much lighter than previous Solaris versions (well, 7 on. 2.6 was pretty zippy in comparison later versions).

  • Goodbye to Oracle ? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by camiel ( 147723 )
    I believe that Oracle is most often installed on Sun Solaris servers, so I am wondering whether Oracle should be worried by this announcement from Sun to offer extensive support for PostgreSQL. It seems that open source databases (Firebird, MySQL, PostgreSQL) are becoming greater threat to commercial ones like Oracle and DB2. Anyway, I think that PostgreSQL is great fit for Sun, because they will have relatively low development costs, but will nevertheless enable them to sell more hardware.

    • Re:Goodbye to Oracle ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by tweek ( 18111 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @07:47AM (#14061653) Homepage Journal
      I don't think opensource databases are becoming any more of a threat than they were in the past. They really do cater to a different market. This is WHY you see SQL Express and the new Oracle license.

      Here's the deal. The company where I'm the SysAdmin has 3 databases we support - DB2 (Linux and AIX), SQL Server (financial product decision made outside of our department without our consultation) and PostgreSQL.

      DB2 runs our core database for our enterprise application. All databases were investigated at the onset of this project and DB2 came out on top. SQL Server is in house for a shitty financial package (Navision) and another legacy system. PostgreSQL is our data warehouse.

      Because of some issues surrounding our DBA team and the fact that SysAdmins often have to cameo as DBAs in a quick pinch, I've come to learn quite a bit about DB2. It has its warts and bugs but it's 100 times more robust than PostgreSQL and 1000 times more robust than MySQL (which we use for a few self-managed databases here and there - intranet stuff/nagios).

      We're currently migrating our data warehouse to a new hardware set and at the same time upgrading from 8.0.3 to 8.1 of PostgreSQL. This requires a restore of the database to migrate. This 80GB datawarehouse took the better part of a day to restore on a box that was 10 times faster than the original. Reading from different volumes on different controllers on our SAN on an x445 with 8 CPUs and 16GB of memory took 8 hours to restore!

      This box used to run DB2 on Linux (we just migrated to AIX and a new SAN) and could restore a 100GB production database in 45 minutes.

      The box wasn't being used. I/O wait was at 1% the entire time. Each of the 8 CPUs was 90% idle the entire time. Of course memory was maxed out because PostgreSQL uses the OS to cache for it but we weren't using any swap. This was using the native PostgreSQL compressed backup format.

      Oddly enough for PostgreSQL, I had less insight into what the database was doing during that time than I would have with DB2.

      In DB2 I can make memory changes on the fly - db cfg, dbm cfg and speed this process up. I can use db2mtrk to see what my memory is doing. I have things like bufferpools to allocate memory where it's really needed.

      With postgresql, I can change a text file (which I love) but have to restart postgres for a lot of them to take effect. Some db2 changes require an instance restart as well but not many anymore.

      Some of the problem lay with me and I'll admit that but some also lay with PostgreSQL.

      The whole point is that DB2 and Oracle don't normally go after the same market as MySQL and PostgreSQL. Are there companies using those databases in place of DB2 or Oracle? Sure. And I'm sure they're very happy and have a nice humming system. Our warehouse runs wonderfully on PostgreSQL and there are no complaints but more often than not, the markets simply don't intersect.

      • kill -HUP? (Score:3, Informative)

        by coder111 ( 912060 )
        Um, kill -HUP forces postgres to reload config, it works for some (all?) configuration changes, and I didn't notice it being a real restart- clients don't get disconnected.

        Fix me if I'm wrong, i didn't use this feature much. But it worked for me when I needed it.

        --Coder
        • Yes, that generally works. /etc/init.d/postgresql reload also normally does the same thing.

          There may be configuration parameters that this won't reset, but I haven't changed enough during runtime to know.

      • Re:Goodbye to Oracle ? (Score:3, Informative)

        by tcopeland ( 32225 ) *
        > took 8 hours to restore!

        You may want to check out the comments about the "checkpoint_segments" configuration parameter here [sun.com]; tweaking that appears to improve bulk loading performance considerably.

        PostgreSQL is doing a fine job for my database [blogs.com], although it's a much smaller installation than yours. Only 4M records, but, hey.

        • Re:Goodbye to Oracle ? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by tweek ( 18111 )
          Actually that WAS done. The settings are really well defined for a datawarehouse environment.

          Our biggest fact table has 48M rows if I'm not mistaken. It might actually be larger than that. As a side note about 1/3rd of that table gets updated every night as part of our warehouse load. Vacuums are a killer for us.

          One thing I did read is that you could disable fsync for the restore process. We may just make that a normal documented task anyway.

          On yet another note, since we're moving to new hardware, one thing
      • Have you tried some of the tips in this?

        Populating a Database [postgresql.org]
        One may need to insert a large amount of data when first populating a database. This section contains some suggestions on how to make this process as efficient as possible.

    • Lets face it - Oracle isnt kicking Sun's butt - its IBM. Ever since the dot com bubble burst and IBM finally found its game, the sun has been setting (or eclipsed (ha-ha!)) with IBM stealing more and more of Sun's customers and grabbing new accounts. Part of the problem for Sun is that IBM has the ability to sell solutions. You want a software stack to handle applications? IBM has it (WebSphere, DB2, etc). You want a software stack to manage infrastructure? IBM has that too (all the Tivoli stuff). You want

  • Sun opening up? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AntiDragon ( 930097 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @06:07AM (#14061368)
    Interesting. Could this be an indication of things to come?

    Sun haven't been particularly enthusiastic about open source in the past. Most of the time they give the impressiosn of not really knowing what to do with it - like a kid with a really great new toy only they don't know how to use it. Take OO.o for example and the older funky licensing. They seemed to suffer from some weird love-hate dichotomy.

    Sun used to be real big, well, I mean "bigger" - but really lost their way. Now we have Open Solaris, re-licensed OO.o, the funky new Niagra uber-processor (can't wait to see if^H^Hhow it works) and now what appears to be a very cool corporate offering of a OSS database - and a commitment to commit all modifications back to the project as well.

    Did someone at Sun suffer from one of those wossnames...epithany thingies?

    • Re:Sun opening up? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sun haven't been particularly enthusiastic about open source in the past.

      The thing is, Sun has had to do a lot of work behind the scenes to get to where it is today on Open Source.

      For example, it's about half a decade now since the project to open-source Solaris was started. There was an incredible amount of legal, engineering and commercial work to be done to get there.

      These things don't happen on a whim.

    • Re:Sun opening up? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kunta Kinte ( 323399 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @09:10AM (#14062035) Journal
      Interesting. Could this be an indication of things to come?

      Opening up? Things to come?

      Sun has been one of the biggest commercial open source supporters for years now. Probably only surpassed by IBM and the Linux companies ( RedHat and Suse, Linux is their core business after all ).

      Millions to buy StarOffice, millions to setup and run OO.org and OpenDocument development, marketing, promoting OpenDocument. Releasing packages like GridEngine, etc. http://www.sunsource.net/ [sunsource.net]. Years of shipping and support opensource applications to companies that would never have used it otherwise.

      Back when I was a network admin, we got a whole lot of GNU software in the system by first showing superiors that Sun endorsed those packages and actually provided solaris binaries.

      Sun's main issue is PR, I suspect. When IBM does something good, it makes sure everyone knows. But that doesn't seem to be McNealy's style...

  • Don't bother (Score:3, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @06:12AM (#14061380)
    There's no point in calling Red Hat today, they're going to be in meetings all day, trying to figure out "What do we do now?"

    That sound you hear, to coin a phrase, is Sun, cutting off Red Hat's air supply.

    • Since when we're glad that a major Unix developing company is killing a major Linux company? I believe somebody forgot to send me the memo
  • What Larry Ellison thinks of this announcement...

  • What did you do in the database wars? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flying pig ( 925874 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @07:05AM (#14061521)
    Microsoft (SQL Express) and Oracle have now produced free-ish low end versions of their databases to try and kill MySQL. Which gives a cheap Windows platform with a reasonable database for no incremental cost (MySQL is an incremental cost to deploy on Windows, and getting progressively more expensive.). Sun retaliates with PostgreSQL. There is clearly a big battle shaping up at the low end, and hopefully the winner will be the end user. The loser? Well, currently it looks like it might be MySQL. When we've finished digesting all the recent announcements, I suspect we may well be porting our application from MySQL to either Oracle or PostgreSQL on Solaris, for sound commercial and support reasons.

    How will MySQL respond? I'd be sad to lose our investment over the last five years, but commercially the words "Oracle" or "Sun" just radiate comfort factor to less well informed customers.

    • "When we've finished digesting all the recent announcements, I suspect we may well be porting our application from MySQL to either Oracle or PostgreSQL on Solaris, for sound commercial and support reasons."

      I have been running PGSQL on Linux since the 6.0 series. I would consider myself a prime candidate (small company, we run all of our customer service and core telecommunications service products (IVR) on top of the PGSQL database. I just don't see enough value-add to buy Sun equipment to run their flav
    • Dear Flying pig,

      Sun supporting Postgres is not aiming at the low-end. MySQL will continue to develop features they told us we didn't need and Postgres has had for years.

      Meanwhile moving to Postgres won't be that difficult. You'll probably find a few features that make it so you no longer need a few ugly hacks.

    • PostgreSQL is a NICE package... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @12:05PM (#14063649)
      We moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL a few years ago, and couldn't be happier. The secret is to do it intelligently...

      First, just do a straight port, get PostgreSQL running your MySQL data.

      Buy a beefier server, because at this stage, PostgreSQL WILL be slower. For raw reading of simple databases (the old joke that MySQL isn't a real database isn't AS true anymore, but is in the ideas), MySQL is faster. PostgreSQL shines as you build more complicated system.

      Second, use explain and start optimizing your system. MySQL develop tends to do series of queries, because the MySQL protocol is nearly "free." Doing 5 queries and doing the joins in the software in MySQL tends to be fast, but is REALLY slow in PostgreSQL. So start building more complicated queries using joins server side. At this stage, PostgreSQL catches up (or nearly so) with MySQL.

      Third, learn PL/pgSQL. This lets you do a LOT of optimizations with triggers and functions. For example, if you need to look things up in 3 tables to get the Primary Keys, then query a third table, in MySQL you do 3 SELECTS, store the values in variables, then the final SELECT to get the data. In PostgreSQL that would be painfully slow (the connection costs kill you), so you do a massive join, which is okay if you have enough RAM and configure PostgreSQL to use it, but it sucks up memory. Then you build the PL/pgSQL function. This lets you do it the "old way" grabbing the data, keeping it in variables INSIDE the database, then doing the query. This is REALLY REALLY REALLY fast in PostgreSQL, keeps the RAM usage reasonable, etc. Sure you can throw 4-8 GBs at RAM cheaply, but when you start doing a bunch of really big JOINs and SORTs, you can't always get PostgreSQL to use it smartly.

      Fourth, at triggers whereever possible. If you ever run a COUNT or other aggregate, re-think. For example, in a forum (trivial case, but fun), you may want to display the number of threads in a topic. Well, running a SELECT COUNT(*) on the threads JOIN topics will BE BALLS slow on PostgreSQL... HOWEVER, you instead do a trigger that keeps a count in the TOPIC called threads. You would do this in MySQL by having a second INSERT when you do a thread, but in PostgreSQL, you let the database handle it. ON INSERT to THREADS, find the topic and thread_count := thread_count + 1; ON DELETE to THREADS, find the topic and thread_count := thread_count - 1; It's trivial when you get the hang of it, but then your system is lightning fast.

      Also, optimize your INSERTs. In areas where you currently check IF "is this already here" THEN UPDATE ELSE INSERT, you do that in stored Functions. function insert_or_update (values) that does an UPDATE and if it fails, INSERT, or otherwise does the logic server side.

      Once you learn to do real database programming, even at the rudimentary level I described, PostgreSQL SCREAMS. If you are building web sites/web applications, they SCREAM. However, if you treat PostgreSQL the way most treat MySQL, as a data dump, you'll be miserable at the performance.

      Final neat idea that we never implemented... but will one day. We were planning to use PL/php (there is a PL/perl) for a performance hack. For each major script that does a bunch of queries, even with optimizations, there is a final hack you COULD THEORETICALLY do... this is a hack, admittedly. Basically, instead of doing queries, define an associated array with all the data you want. In development, do a bunch of queries and put the data into the array, then process it. For optimization, move those queries to the server. Then you build the array in PL/php, serialize it, and return it as text. Now you call the PL/php function (SELECT get_FooPage_Info(page_identifier) that returns a text value, the serialized array. Now you have one database connection, it does ALL the work INSIDE the database process, and in PHP land, you just work off the array).

      PostgreSQL is EXTREMELY powerful for areas where most people use
  • Suns way of supporting Open Source Software on their architecture ist quite interesting. With Support for Apache and PostgreSQL they have a full suite to support websides from small to enterprise (as PostgreSQL is a bit more "enterprise" ready).

    What I wonder is if you should get such support and just use it as fallback for your problems on different architectures. That way you could test if your problem is specific to your setup and if you can reproduce it, you can use Suns fix and port it back to your re

  • Although I am seeing some high-end financial-transactional based systems running Redhat lately, I am glad that Sun has its ear close to the ground.

    I moved to PosgreSQL 2 years ago, and this has re-affirmed my confidence in Sun in embracing open source initiatives.

    I guess it was absolutely something that had to happen, to re-invent yourself. IBM did it, Apple did it.

    The future for Sun should be interesting in the next couple of years, I most certainly will be watching.

    Maybe we should buy shares in Sun? Sitti
  • It looks like a little bit of convergance on a class of database (big) and a platform (big).

    Independantly, Oracle bought the company the provides the innobase substructure for MySQL.

    --dave

  • Oracle has recently cozied up to Sun Solaris [yahoo.com]. I wonder what Oracle's reaction to this Sun/PostgreSQL announcement is, especially since Oracle recently tried to take out MySQL [slashdot.org]?

  • Sun seems to finally be getting it. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dghcasp ( 459766 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @09:22AM (#14062131)
    On a somewhat related topic, I received an email recently saying that Sun's developer package is now free, instead of $3000.

    Finally. Sun hasn't shipped a C compiler with its OS since SunOS 4.1.3 (circa 1990).

  • How is a "Red Hat binary" different from a "Linux binary"? What will it take to make Debian Linux binaries run on Solaris 10 with this Container tech running? Will Debian Linux binaries run on Debian Solaris [gnusolaris.org] with the Container running?

    • Re:Debian Solaris (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      Libraries. All 'Linux' tells you is where the system calls live (which number for which call). Red Hat Enterprise Linux tells you what libraries you can expect to find installed - i.e. what you can install without requiring additional dependencies. This is why some companies only support RHEL or SuSE (or whatever), rather than 'Linux'.
      • I think distro-specific support also means dependency on a distro's filesystem directory structure (where apps find called binaries/executables, including libraries). I suppose a system of symlinks can replicate any distro's dir structure on any other distro. I wonder if there's a script that creates those cross-distro symlinks, and if there's a "Grand Unified Structure" that would allow access to any distro as if it were any other.
    • Eh? Why would you want to do that? Solaris 10 performs so much better than Linux and gives you Dtrace to figure out what is going on when things dont run well. You would not realize the performance gains if you ran Linux as a Container under Solaris 10 and then ran Linux binaries.
      • Because I have lots of Debian software that I need to run. I have things I need to do in my work. I pick the apps that do that work. That determines the OS, that will run those apps. In turn that determines the hardware. I have secondary considerations like cost that determine the choices at each of those layers, when I have choices. So now that I have the option to run Linux apps on Solaris, I have the choice of whether it's better for me to run those apps on Linux or on Solaris. My decision's performance
        • I assume you are not running a large organization with 100's or 1000's of users where the performance hit would mean something. If your apps are resource intensive you might need bigger hardware might be the downside of doing Linux under Solaris. What apps do you have that are not able to be ported as binaries or recompiled to take advantage of Solaris 10?

  • Postgres - Oracle? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @10:19AM (#14062577) Homepage Journal
    The announcement cites Postgres as Sun's RDBMS, bundled and supported. It also cites Solaris as Oracle's preferred (64bit) OS. Is Solaris now the best environment for developing relational apps on Postgres, then moving to Oracle for release versions? Will the Sun tech, support and Oracle partnership make the port from Postgres -> Oracle easy, even "automated"?
  • I remember attending a presentation from Sun personel demoing their portal mail system, how they prided themselves at not competing with the application providers who develop for Solaris. I remember Oracle was mentioned specifically by name. They provided a counter-example in Microsoft, who produces both SQL-Server and the operating system.

    Oh well.

    So confused -- Sun becomes more evil by supporting PostgreSQL ?

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