Open source will keep making strides

Open source will keep making strides

PostgreSQL developers feel that open source is penetrating deep and wide as they release version 8.3 of this open source based database

Pratima Harigunani

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

PUNE, INDIA: Till sometime ago, only smart guys were pushing open source software but today it has become a lot more user-friendly and an enterprise entity.

Open source (OS) terrain has become more professionalized today. Communities work like any other professional organization with discipline and control in place and in an organized manner, says Nikhil S, an OS enthusiast who was an active participant for PostgreSQl from India.

"Be it work-in-progress on patches and their reviews or the incremental approach used in development, a lot has changed and become more organized," he says.

That's quite visible, if one goes by the sophisticated versions open source communities are coming up with. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has recently released version 8.3 with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors from 18 countries.

"Its major performance enhancements are Heap Only Tuples (HOT) (which eliminate up to three-fourth of the maintenance overhead of frequently updated tables), spread checkpoints and background writer auto tuning, which reduce the impact of checkpoints on response times.

It also has asynchronous commit option for much faster response times on some transactions. These changes also significantly accelerate transaction processing throughput, between five per cent and 30 per cent, depending on the workload," explains Ashish Mehra, spokesperson for PostgreSQL in India.

"In addition, there are new features for application developers, like ANSI-standard SQL/XML support, including XML export, Text search and TSearch2 that has been merged into the core distribution with better management and new dictionaries and languages and GSSAPI and SSPI authentication support. It also has new data types: UUIDs, ENUMs and arrays of composite types."

"Open source software has picked up very fast in India of late. PostgreSQL especially is being used by various corporates, cutting across size and nature of operations. Interestingly, it is now being used in a number of government projects and schemes in India. The new version is certainly going to augment growth among users and developers alike," Mehra adds.

On the usage side too, the scenario has evolved and spread. In fact, there has been adoption in government areas with passport applications and police stations using PostgreSQL increasingly as Mehra says.

"The earlier perception of a free software has changed and lot of consultants and open-source communities are being approached by government departments," he explains.

On the industry side OS has spread across even the HR and accounting systems, he adds.

"I think NASA, a lot of US government agencies, Australian government and revenue department are using it as well."

Commenting on the resurgence of open source in the commercial market and its confrontation with proprietary software, both Nikhil and Mehra exude a bullish feeling.

"Open source is still free but the add-ons come with a price, OSS will keep affecting proprietary counterparts but the quality of software has to grow across the board. It's coming up as the building block of many other products and enterprise section as well."

Nikhil shrugs off issues like scale, compatibility and legacy problems here.

"For any software there are standards in place today and PostgreSQL is the most scalable enterprise class database.”

PostgreSQl, a high-performance object-relational database management system, has traversed its main pain point of usability.

"It worked but there were a lot of steps to install and compile and hence it was not that easy to use. That has improved with a lot of UI and tools that have been introduced," says Mehra.

The next exciting thing happening around PostgreSQL is localization. Mehra points out that with some work already underway in Tamil and Japanese this is the next effort that will make the penetration wider.

Mehra, who also heads EnterpriseDB, says that EnterpriseDB uses PostgreSQl in a native state and builds upon it with a layer and a lot of other tools.

PostgreSQL claims to be the first open source database to implement Synchronized Scan, which greatly reduces I/O for data mining.

It is the collective work of many developers, building on twenty-one years of development, which began at the University of California, Berkeley.

It is distributed under a BSD license, which allows use and distribution without fees for both commercial and non-commercial applications.

(pratimah@cybermedia.co.in)

©CyberMedia News

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