I just found this old thread.

I suggest you reread Stephane’s comment, since the point of it evidently zoomed over your head, and consider which company that might be referring to. (Hint: It’s Oracle.)

In the 1980s, Oracle kept talking about a port to the IBM mainframe, and having a little trouble delivering. Indeed, I started referring to the figure of two years away as being “Larry Ellison’s Constant.” But then one time I was chatting with his admin, the incomparable Jenny Overstreet, and asked her if the port was going to be shipped any time soon. Her response was, and I quote:

“Let me put it this way — I’m sitting here reading an MVS manual.”

As Larry often told me, Oracle made great use of what might be regarded as other companies’ trade secrets in the 1970s and 1980s. If he was morally right then, and I think he was, EnterpriseDB is morally right now. I’m not going to pretend to know the legalities here, specifically as to whether Oracle licenses allow compatibility engineering (if they do, it’s probably due more to anti-trust pressures than general public-spiritedness). But, even in the worst-case scenario for EnterpriseDB, which would be that licenses are written more tightly today than they were in the old days, and the effect is to put EnterpriseDB on shakier legal ground than Oracle was, I think it’s a big non-issue.

CAM

CAM

On the other hand, just as vigorously as Oracle work their licensing, their own consultants are just as vigorous in pushing a line of “its all free! grab what you want” without putting a prerequisite asterisk next to the word “free”

“Again, though, this is not the place for a detailed development methodology discussion, and I won’t discuss this issue further in this forum.”

…Consider it my personal crusade. After having been an Engineer in a software startup who paid the Oracle Partner Network dues, I just get suspicious that others are not as prudent. Andy, thanks for your comment, but it does not appease my morbid curiosity about whether EnterpriseDB manages to support an Oracle-compatible database without having a single instance or Oracle running in labs. Your comment does not confirm, nor deny whether you have Oracle running in your labs.

I’ve received a lot of noise email from people reminding me that it is possible to “match paint” as it were, but I question the likelihood that such claims of compatibility could be made without having touched the targeted software. But hey, that’s just me and this is just my blog.

Using Amdahl/IBM as an example is interesting, although I wonder if Amdahl did what they did without having touched an IBM mainframe? Or better yet, whether IBM license terms of the day would have been iron clad against the unthinkable (producing a mainframe clone). I don’t know the answer to these rhetorical questions, but they are moot nonetheless. The important thing to me (personally) is what people do with software downloaded from Oracle Technology Network. At this point it seems clear to me that I am the lone crusader of this issue.

You have now officially been added to the circle-file on my blog. That is a very difficult feat to accomplish. You either didn’t read the post or you didn’t understand it. Either way, you followed up with trash and I’m not having any of it on my blog.

That mess between you and Jonathan Lewis bled over to my blog and I cleaned that up as per your request but then you come up with this Gomer Pile move on this Oracle licensing thread. Not smart.

Andy Astor has proven himself a class act with his comment herein. Don, learn a lesson.

Uh Huh, sure, whatever you say. I;m sure that your choice of URL was totally innocent:

enterprisedb-the-best-pirated-oracle-compatible-database-available

It worked too, a classic smear job:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=enterprisedb+pirated

Oh, and who says “reverse engineering” had to be used? Are you an engineer, Kevin?

Software engineers tell me that they don’t need to reverse engineer something to replicate it’s functionality.

Thanks for blogging about us. While I might quibble with your title and a couple of your points, you’ve clearly spent a lot of time and energy understanding the EnterpriseDB offering. I appreciate that. For the most part, your understanding of our business is accurate. To address a couple of the issues you raise:

1. “How can a 2 year old company funded with $28 million venture capital get as much press as these guys? It’s because the term Open Source is involved.”

Well, being affiliated with open source is certainly helpful to us, but I think you’ll find that we get a lot more press because of the sound business benefits we provide to the over 125 customers that purchased EnterpriseDB in our first 18 months in the market. These companies include Sony Online Entertainment, Vonage, and FTD. Nothing drives press coverage like customer stories. In terms of getting coverage for our open source affiliation, we’re certainly the largest PostgreSQL company in the world. But you should also know that the EnterpriseDB Advanced Server product is actually commercially licensed, and is not open source.

2. “What does Sun get by recommending EnterpriseDB into an Oracle shop?”

By recommending to its customers the most effective and efficient solution available, Sun benefits enormously by being viewed as a true business partner. Clearly, Sun believed that EnterpriseDB provided the best value for FTD’s situation and requirements. And judging by FTD’s reaction, they were right.

3. “The 75% of 100% is nebulous because even the FTD webinar suggested there is more to it than that.”

You’re absolutely right. The FTD applications were Oracle Reports® applications, so I’m not surprised that they required changes. But most of the applications we encounter (about 75% of them) are 100% compatible. The FTD applications simply do not fit into that category.

4. “The question I have is how in the world EnterpriseDB can claim to enhance PostgreSQL providing an even higher level of Oracle compatibility.”

Compatibility has a long tradition in the technology business. Some of the most celebrated examples of the past couple of decades include (a) Amdahl and IBM, (b) MCI and AT&T, (c) Dell and Compaq, and (d) Linux and Unix. Indeed, in the case of Linux, I think most would agree that Linux succeeded because of its compatibility — and lower cost — rather than its technical superiority. We offer a phenomenal database with compatibility at a fraction of the cost. It’s really that simple.

In terms of our development methodology, this is simply not an appropriate forum for a debate on licensing and legal issues. Suffice it to say that we have retained excellent legal advice from the start, and that non-Oracle-based sources have everything you might need to develop a compatible product. Take a wander in your local Barnes and Noble. Again, though, this is not the place for a detailed development methodology discussion, and I won’t discuss this issue further in this forum.

I hope this response is helpful, and that you continue to follow us in the market. By the way, look for the forthcoming “EnterpriseDB: The Definitive Reference” by Oracle ACE Lewis Cunningham, coming soon to a bookstore near you…

Andy Astor, CEO
EnterpriseDB Corporation
andy.astor@enterprisedb.com
http://andyastor.blogspot.com

You’re missing most of the point. The point is companies like EnterpriseDB can’t even have Oracle instances up for testing and support without proper license. By the way, can I possibly be any clearer about the fact that I am only raising the suspicion while alerting people to the true contents of the OTN license agreement.

I’m independent. No one paid me to be curious about how a company like EnterpriseDB can claim compatibility and offer support of same without having instances of Oracle up in their labs and unless I’m blind I don’t see EnterpriseDB in the Oracle Partner Network

That’s all, nothing sinister.

If someone says they have developed an “Oracle-compatible” database, I think perhaps Oracle has been around for a long time, and perhaps Borders has a book on PL/SQL that people can read and internalize and which doesn’t require a copy of Oracle’s database, nor would I ever need to talk to anybody from Oracle in order to simulate.

If people are doing the wrong thing they will be found out. But methinks there is a rat here when you fire a cannon at this point in the discussion, when you haven’t even done basic research.

Who’s paying you for your opinion?

Funny like all this reminds me of 25 years back, when some aggressive small database startup was claiming full compatibility with IBM’s DB2 … keywords were identical, everything was identical. Even for tools like the data loader, similarity was striking. They even improved similarity as as versions were released - I remember that what was called “partition” in a version became “tablespace” in the next. It is true that at this time, DB2 was a pure MVS product while the said startup had targeted the VMS customer base initially. But they ported their software to VM/CMS (to compete with SQL/DS) and to MVS at one point. I wonder if they had licenses. If I remember correctly, their CEO was an ex-Amdhal.

Paweł

I’ll take that. However, notice there is a difference between the title of the post and the content. I did lead with “OK, maybe pirated is a strong word, read on…” after all.

You are right. I have no idea just how righteous EnterpriseDB and the PostgreSQL community in general are. Who knows, maybe they buy so many Oracle licenses they get special discounts. After all, why wouldn’t Oracle be tickled pink to license use of their product to a direct competitor!

Let me put it to you this way. Tonight I will sleep well knowing I’ve NEVER used Oracle software outside the scope of proper license and that dates back to 5.1.17. On the other hand, I’d bet dollars to donuts that there are handfuls of well-meaning contributers to the PostgreSQL code line that have Oracle instances up and running on their development machines. You simply don’t get that much open source oracle-compatible code without at least a few developers downloading from OTN and going to work. I could be wrong. It could be that every line of code that makes PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB oracle-compatible was contributed by professionals using fully licensed Oracle installs. Or yeah, maybe every contributer of oracle-compatible features in those products are OPN members. Sure, no problem.

Maybe I’m nuts, I’ll grant you that. Maybe Larry Ellison himself handed a site license to the folks that are coding a product that claims to replace the Oracle database.

Yes, I’m crabbier than normal today. Anarchy doesn’t turn me on. Matt, I’ll likely see you at OOW. Let’s beer over this one.

I typically find myself in violent agreement with you, but in this case, I think you’re way off base. First of all, you attack EnterpriseDB for the amount of press they get and the amount of money they’ve raised vs. Vertica. However, Vertica has raised 23.5m without getting any customers or shipping any product, while EnterpriseDB has gone through several versions of their product and booked “millions” of dollars of software license revenue - pretty impressive. I suspect the amount of press they get is due to the fact they have customers, make money, and have a clear and consistent message.

Second, it’s pretty harsh to accuse another company of theft without any actual facts to back it up. We have no idea whether they’re an OPN member - not showing up in the catalog doesn’t mean anything (my company, GridApp, is an Oracle partner and we don’t show up in the catalog). Maybe they bought licenses for EE. Maybe they used an OTN copy to build an internal model of the query language and then got rid of it. The OTN license actually explicitly says that reverse engineering is legit if its for the purposes of “interoperability”, which clearly this qualifies as. The point is, we don’t know they’ve done anything wrong, there’s all sorts of reasons to believe they haven’t, and no evidence that they have. So why refer to it as “the best pirated Oracle-compatible database available”?

As far as the “oracle licenses are free for development”, yeah, I’ve never understood why people thought that was either. OPN is good for many things.

Matt

I can’t answer the licensing/engineering questions. I just don’t know the answer.

I also attended the webinar. All in all I thought it was pretty good. I think the guy from FTD was pretty pissed off at Oracle. He said several times that he was not happy with the support group or with the licensing.

I thought it was weird on this slide:

* All date operations were modified to use EnterpriseDB/PostgreSQL functions instead of Oracle’s
* All columns that had a string operation performed on them in the query itself had to be explicitly cast to an appropriate size
* ROWNUM references had to be modified to use LIMIT (this is no longer necessary in the new version of EnterpriseDB)
* GROUP BY and ORDER BY statements modified to use column numbers instead of column names (when grouping or ordering by complex columns)

I have not used enterprisedb with Oracle Reports but I have worked quite a bit with the database. I *believe* items 1 and 2 are directly related to reports because I have not had those issues.

Item 3 has been fixed. I have never run into item 4. I have done some fairly complicated queries and not need to resort to column numbers. It may be specific functionality that requires it.

I have run into data type conflicts. I would expect an integer to work as a number but sometimes a function won’t recognize the number (which then has to be cast to an integer???).

All in all, EnterpriseDB is a nice database. I’m not sure about the % of compatibility but many of the things you would expect in Oracle are there.

I’m not sure about pirating. I mean is having a “decode” function pirating? If they have someone tell them what a decode is and then write one, is that pirating? DB2 has a decode as of the latest release.

You make some good points but I am not a lawyer. I like databases though and having another Oracle compatible seems like a good thing to me as a consultant (although at the moment I am perm dweebish).

Take care,

LewisC