Sun Microsystems has thrown its weight behind PostgreSQL, announcing plans to distribute and support the open-source database.
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Member since:2005-07-06
They also said that this could be just the start for other OSS databases. Postgres was a better fit for Solaris because of certain enterprise features. It will be available for Soalris X86 and SPARC.
What's key about this statement, notably "this could be just the start", is that it leverages Suns goal to work not just as a manufacturer, but also as a services company. With OSS getting more and more popular, the "professional support" market is just getting started. There's little to stop Sun from creating "experts" in different OSS projects.
But rather than having to support "everything", they can cherry pick the popular applications that suit them and simply support those on top of Solaris. That's why they'll, say, support Gnome and not KDE, or Postgres and not MySQL.
If the demand for MySQL support on Solaris seems to grow, then, they might rally around that banner, but MySQL already has a well know, and formal support organization compared to Postgres (which has some companies, but it's not "obvious").
By dedicating resources to support particular applications, and to make them run better on Solaris, it makes the entire package that much better. If the whole package is better, someone may choose Solaris because it runs Postgres better. And if they're running Solaris, they may well look at Sun to support not just Solaris, but Postgres as well.
Suns goal right now is to lower barriers to choosing Sun software and, indirectly, Sun support and services.
Adopting popular OSS packages makes them look just that much better.
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Member since:
2005-11-15
I was in on the press conference when Sun announced its support for Postgres on Solaris are here are the main points:
DTrace Performance Tuning
DTrace Provider
Solaris Service Manifest
Container Aware
Sun Studio Optimizations
Sun Cluster Postgres Agent
Sun Support 24x7 Worldwide
They also said that this could be just the start for other OSS databases. Postgres was a better fit for Solaris because of certain enterprise features. It will be available for Soalris X86 and SPARC.