Hi folks,

Is there any pre-existing protocol for a company to pay for specific
features to be added to PostgreSQL?

I've gotten full executive buy-in to the idea that it would be far
cheaper to sponsor and pay for people to develop the enterprise features
we need in Postgres than to do an Oracle migration to get those same
features that we need (which would cost unholy amounts of money that we
don't want to spend for our installation). All that said, I don't know
if this is a feasible plan, or what the makeup is of the developers
currently working on Postgres.  As a practical matter, we do not have
the time or people to take on this project in-house.

Our company is interested in sponsoring a push to get enterprise-level
scalability features into PostgreSQL, things like partitioning and
organized heaps. As a practical business matter, Oracle is an option but
one of last resort that we (and I) would prefer to avoid if at all
possible.  We see an obvious long-term benefit to making Postgres do
what we need it to do than buying gobs of Oracle licenses.

Are other people/companies already doing this, either officially or
unofficially, and what is the general protocol for going about doing
this?

Cheers,

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com



18 Nov 2003 11:33:59 -0800
James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Sponsoring enterprise features
On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 14:33, James Rogers wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Is there any pre-existing protocol for a company to pay for specific
> features to be added to PostgreSQL?

There are several people who do this type of work (Neil, Joe, David, the
folks are Command Prompt Inc., etc.).

Personally, I think the best way is simply to make a post on -hackers
with a description of what you want to accomplish with a call for
estimates and proposals. Ensure you require the feature to be applied to
the main code line so it will be maintained for future releases.

I say a description of what you want to accomplish because certain
features are not as useful on PostgreSQL as they are other databases
(data partitioning being one of them, due to the ability to use partial
indexes) so you may not achieve what you are expecting.


Tue, 18 Nov 2003 15:26:38 -0500
Rod Taylor <pg@rbt.ca>
Re: Sponsoring enterprise features
Rod Taylor <pg@rbt.ca> writes:
> Personally, I think the best way is simply to make a post on -hackers
> with a description of what you want to accomplish with a call for
> estimates and proposals. ...
> I say a description of what you want to accomplish because certain
> features are not as useful on PostgreSQL as they are other databases
> (data partitioning being one of them, due to the ability to use partial
> indexes) so you may not achieve what you are expecting.

Right.  You can in any case get a great deal of free advice by starting
a pghackers discussion ;-)

It should be noted that "because Oracle does it that way" is a
guaranteed nonstarter as a rationale for any Postgres feature proposal.
There are enough differences between Postgres and Oracle that you will
need to do significant investigation before assuming that an Oracle-
based feature design is appropriate for Postgres.  Aside from technical
differences, we have fundamentally different priorities --- one of which
is simplicity of administration.  You'll get no buyin on proposals that
tend to create Oracle-like difficulties of installation and tuning.

			regards, tom lane

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 01:20:53 -0500
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Re: Sponsoring enterprise features 
On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 22:20, Tom Lane wrote:
> It should be noted that "because Oracle does it that way" is a
> guaranteed nonstarter as a rationale for any Postgres feature proposal.


A method of doing something is not a "feature"; making something
possible that couldn't be done before is a "feature".  I don't really
care how Oracle does something, though I am cognizant of *why* Oracle
does something.  s/Oracle/DB2/, and little changes.


> There are enough differences between Postgres and Oracle that you will
> need to do significant investigation before assuming that an Oracle-
> based feature design is appropriate for Postgres.  Aside from technical
> differences, we have fundamentally different priorities --- one of which
> is simplicity of administration.  You'll get no buyin on proposals that
> tend to create Oracle-like difficulties of installation and tuning.


I'm not sure what Oracle has to do with any of this.  If I wanted to use
Oracle, I would buy Oracle.  The thing is, I'm intimately familiar with
Oracle and there are a lot of things I despise about Oracle as a
consequence of this familiarity.  The features I'm talking about can be
added to any reasonable database engine, and are generically supported
features (or "enterprise" add-ons) in virtually all large commercial
databases.

As I stated previously, I/we are interested in adding features for
managing very large tables and working sets, and making Postgres scale
in general for these kinds of databases (currently, it does not).  These
kinds of features will be important for enterprise users, particularly
ones interested in migrating from Oracle/DB2/SQLServer/etc, and would be
invisible to people that don't need them.  This is a matter of adding
important functionality that can be supported by any reasonable database
engine.  In a nutshell, the features on my short list are all about heap
management (e.g. partitioning).  This is really important when databases
reach a certain size, but something for which Postgres has almost no
support.  

>From a large-scale enterprise database standpoint, heap management is
almost as important a capability as replication.  Replication is being
aggressively worked on, heap management is not and so we are interested
in making sure this part gets developed.  When PostgreSQL has this,
there will be little reason for anyone to use the big commercial
database-du-jour.  I don't care how its implemented specifically, just
as long as it is in there, and there is no technical reason that it
couldn't be implemented per previous discussions.

I've gotten the green light (and many responses from people interested
in doing it) to start writing up RFQs for specific features, which I
will post to the pg-hackers list.  It is all stuff previously determined
to be doable within the current PostgreSQL framework, and just requiring
some work that my company is willing to help pay for.

Cheers,

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com




21 Nov 2003 09:51:07 -0800
James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Re: Sponsoring enterprise features