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LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology Big news in the tech arena today. EnterpriseDB has just posted about the closing of its series C financing with news that IBM has invested in the company. This is big. IBM doesn’t usually invest in software companies. With Sun buying MySQL, it definitely makes sense. I don’t think Sun will abandon Postgres but it makes sense not to put all of your eggs in one basket. This announcement is much different than when Sun had EnterpriseDB do their Postgres support (yes, EnterpriseDB has been the face of Sun Postgres support for a while now). This is IBM taking a financial stake in the company. EnterpriseDB is not just THE Postgres company, they are also THE Oracle compatible database company. I really believe this is a show changer. When they got started, EnterpriseDB wanted to be a market disruptor and I think this move by IBM proves they are on the right track. When it comes to open source databases and open source database providers, the EnterpriseDB database is faster, more feature rich and comes with better tools. Speaking of the EnterpriseDB database, there has been a branding change at EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been making available a free Postgres package that is a prebuilt set of binaries that also includes some performance improvements and a bundle of enterprise class tools (all of this for free). EnterpriseDB Advanced Server is the package that provides additional performance improvements, additional tools and oracle compatibility (for a licensing fee). EnterpriseDB has rebranded the free package, Postgres Plus, and EnterpriseDB Advanced Server becomes Postgres Plus Advanced Server. The rebranding comes with a major web site overhaul. When you think of EnterpriseDB, you’ll also think Postgres and Oracle. On the web site, I just noticed that it has Try It (Download Postgres Plus) and Buy It (Postgres Plus & Postgres Plus Advanced Server). You can actually download Postgres Plus or Postgres Plus Advanced Server for free and you only have to buy Advanced Server if you use it in a production system. You CAN buy support for Postgres Plus but you can get the software for free. As I said, Postgres Plus is free. There is a free developer license for Advanced Server. That means that not only can you download and play with it, you can develop some real world apps before making the move to production. I’m no lawyer, but i think this license is a lot like Oracle’s developer license. A non-crippled, real deal database. Finally, EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus 8.3 and Postgres Plus Advanced Server (PPAS) 8.3 have been released today. The release of PPAS adds major new functionality and a boatload of new Oracle compatibility features. A few that I will be posting on in the near future are Oracle syntax database links (that can connect to Oracle, Postgres and PPAS), Oracle style SQL hints, additional DBA_, ALL_ and USER_ catalog views, additional built-in packages and a set of snapshot reports for debugging performance issues. I’ll definitely cover some of these in the near future. In the meantime, if you are interested in Oracle compatibility features, I would suggest you check out the Oracle Compatibility doc for 8.3. LewisC