I thought I would start off the new year with somewhat of a recurring theme today - saving money. And specifically, one approach to information management that is being touted as very aligned with this strategy is open source. Although open source is generally working its way into organizations from other angles like JBoss and Linux, open source DBMS is a second-tier port of open source into many organizations.

"Enterprise DB is to Postgres what Red Hat is to Linux" is how the folks at Enterprise DB put it. They augment and expand the open source DBMS Postgres with Oracle, and other, functionality. They use open source Postgres and keep to its updates, unlike other vendors like Netezza and Greenplum, who have picked up a version of Postgres at some point and forked off. I'm not necessarily putting either approach forward as a virtue, just as the facts. Other open source DBMS models include the more popular MySQL, which is owned by Sun, who could close-source it at some point if desired. Some of the newer features in MySQL (MySQL Enterprise) are only available to paying customers.

Note some of the legacy of Postgres in the picture. "Post"gres stands for post-Ingress.

Sometimes the functionality in Enterprise DB trails Oracle by a year depending on the need in the marketplace. However, it is a tight fit and code port effort has to do with the depth of recent Oracle SQL extensions used. Enterprise DB is targeting the SMB market, who may not need all the bells and whistles of closed source DBMS. They offer support of open source Postgres and 2 levels of support (code is free) for Enterprise DB, their variation of Postgres. At $4500 for an annual subscription, it's not free, but enticing.

I will be responding to an ask-the-expert question here on the B-Eye-Network very soon on whether open source can be used to run an enterprise data warehouse. Look for it in the video blogs here.
The open source DBMS are mostly utilized in OLTP. However, I think that is more a result of more DBMS in OLTP. So can open source work in EDW? Yes, it can and yes it is. I've been ramping up my team's capabilities around open source. I'll have some cautions about open source EDW when I get to the video.

Technorati tags: data, Business Intelligence, open source, Enterprise DB,MySQL