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Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people
- spidaman 14y agoSalesforce spends a huge amount of money on licensing their horizontally scaled Oracle databases. I'd venture to guess this signals Benioff exploring a strategic bet to tell Ellison to fuck off once and for all.
- kami8845 14y agoActually hiring 50 people sounds more like a decisive plan than "exploring a strategic bet".
- spidaman 14y agoThe posting says they're hiring only 5 now, 40-50 next year;I inferred they're still in an exploratory phase because if they were all in, they'd be hiring more than 5 now. The posting doesn't say they're doing a migration but having worked on Oracle -> PostgreSQL migrations and sharded database infrastructures, it makes sense.
- kami8845 14y agoOf course nothing is ever final, but publicly announcing something like this is already sort of a "fuck you" to Oracle, so I'd be surprised if they weren't a 100% sure of their plans to switch.
- miah_ 14y agoHaving worked at Salesforce I can say they take _forever_ to move on anything. When I left the company two years ago they were just starting to talk about Postgresql as a option to replace Oracle..
- jeremyjh 14y agoThis sounds like they could be building something awesome.
- rabidsnail 14y agoReminder: Salesforce owns Heroku
- timmillwood 14y agoThis is the first thing I thought when I read it.
- pjscott 14y agoThey do say, though, that the job is to "Design and implement major pieces of the salesforce.com core database infrastructure". That doesn't sound like they're talking about Heroku, at least not as the main reason for their hiring spree.
- miah_ 14y agoAll of Salesforce production uses Oracle.. It costs them some serious $$$. Oracle is one of Salesforces competitors.
- klint 14y agoBe that as it may a Salesforce.com representative told me that the hiring is related to the Heroku Postgres service, not a migration from Oracle to Postgres [1]. Perhaps the person writing the job ad was embellishing by calling it a major piece of the core database infrastructure. [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/salesforce-oracle/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/salesforce-orac...
- Evbn 14y agoOr Salesforce is moving to dogfood heroku internally.
- sargun 14y agoI wonder if they're finally switching from Oracle to Postgres. I know that their Oracle clusters are a significant portion of their bottom line. Alternatively, I wonder if this is a replacement for their new Hbase cluster for feeds. There seem to be lots of projects at SFDC that could be supported by Postgresql. It's going to be great though, considering the community might get some great tools from this.
- sheff 14y agoFrom what I've read about the Salesforce Oracle backend in the past, they are big users of Oracle RAC . Hopefully if Salesforce switch they will develop some form of Postgres clustering solution which would be great for the Postgres community, as an active-active clustering solution with the characteristics of RAC would make Postgres even more competitive in the enterprise.
- mmaunder 14y agoThis is why. Every time I launch MySQL client: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 1024604 Server version: 5.1.63-0ubuntu0.10.04.1-log (Ubuntu) Copyright (c) 2000, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
- olalonde 14y agoI don't get it...
- mikeevans 14y agoAll the Oracle stuff.
- pbiggar 14y agoI think he's saying that Oracle's aggressive branding of MySQL (and other Sun products) has alienated some people.
- fletchowns 14y agoWhy does that matter, when Oracle already powers Salesforce?
- pbiggar 14y agoRight. I don't agree with the OP, I just think that's what he was saying. Salesforce doesn't seem like someone to be put off by aggressive anything.
- darnaut 14y agoYou mean the copyright notice? It was there before Oracle acquired Sun.
- Evbn 14y agoPretty it sure it isn't the branding that's the problem, it's the brand. Oracle is no friend of open source software projects.
- mark_l_watson 14y agoNot surprising after reading what the CEOs of Oracle and Salesforce have been saying in the news lately. I don't use Oracle (my customers tend to be budget conscious). Even without Oracle experience it makes some real sense to whenever possible use free software if the total costs of software development, deployment, and maintenance are less - assuming equivalent functionality, scalability, etc.
- cs702 14y agoWith Oracle slowly transforming MySQL into a 'free-open-core, closed-outer-shell' RDBMS[1], PostgreSQL is quickly becoming the main go-to alternative for anyone who wants to avoid database vendor lock-in. Hopefully SalesForce will contribute its improvements back to the PostgreSQL community. -- [1] For example, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797
- tlogan 14y agoAnd then Oracle will buy Salesforce... Larry did say something like that but he said that the price is too high. Here is my predictions: Salesforce is will start investing into new technologies and building cool stuff. However, that will not look good on stock price because R&D costs will skyrocket - and our "efficient" stock market does not like long term visions. The stock price will collapse. The board will panic and Larry will "save the day".
- mason55 14y agoLarry and the Oracle execs truly hate SFDC. They really build up the rivalry internally to Oracle employees and paint Salesforce as the big rival that everyone needs to band together to beat. Combined with the duplication of products that would occur if Oracle acquired Salesforce I would be beyond shocked if it ever happened. At that point Salesforce would be so irrelevant that it wouldn't matter.
- tlogan 14y agoIn my experience, things you described are probably true, but they have nothing to do with acquisition. Actually it is very much desired (Larry was hating PeopleSoft a few years ago... and see what happen). And duplication of products was never a problem for Larry: he just kills the one with less customers. For example, in case of BEA and Oracle Application Server: BEA WebLogic replaced Oracle Application Server. In this case, in case of acquisition, Oracle cloud offering will be replaced with Salesforce.
- hristov 14y ago
- systems 14y agothe lists of pgsql contributors and committersdoesnt look that big http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers Are they gonna hire them all :))) I bet most of their hires will be ppl who never touched pgsql
- goronbjorn 14y agoI wonder if this has anything to do with Heroku or eventually will; Postgres is very much one of Heroku's core offerings.
- 055static 14y agoPlease clarify: Is [a-zA-Z]*SQL a query language or is it software (i.e. an implementation of an interpreter for a language)?
- lobster_johnson 14y agoPostgreSQL is an RDBMS.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- andyzweb 14y agoORDBMS
- andrewcooke 14y agoif i understand what you're asking then i think you'd call it an implementation. both mysql and postgresql are database implementations that can be queried using the sql language. however, both also extend the language (as defined by ansi standard) in various ways.
- 055static 14y agoI'm curious where the most perceived "value" is. For example, is it in the internal structures of the database? Is it in the query language? Is it in the fact that everything is packaged together as a "system"? I have seen a database that uses an SQL-like language but it is not a RDB. It's said to be much faster than Oracle, but it certainly doesn't need the SQL syntax to work. Needless to say, the speed doesn't come from the SQL syntax. :) It made me wonder about decoupling the language from the interpreter. Without the SQL characteristic, would anyone be attracted to the MySQL, PostgresSQL, ..., WhizBangSQL systems?
- zem 14y agowhat postgresql, mysql etc. provide is a relational database, i.e. a way to store table-structured data with consistency and safety guarantees and efficiently perform operations to retrieve and update rows from it. sql is simply the standard language in which relational queries are expressed.
- spidaman 14y agoI use MySQL plenty and there's a lot of things I like about it. But I honestly don't understand any of the MySQL related comments on this post. Even if Oracle didn't own MySQL, a migration from Oracle to MySQL is significantly more difficult than one from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The poor join performance of MySQL make it doubtful that it could have ever been a serious discussion at Salesforce (to say nothing of the merits of mvcc and PostgreSQL's license).
- rimantas 14y ago> to say nothing of the merits of mvcc I want to know more about the merits ov mvcc and why don't they apply to MySQL.
- lucian1900 14y agoBecause it doesn't do MVCC, it locks instead.
- seunosewa 14y agoFalse. InnoDB does MVCC by default.
- nnq 14y ago...now if I'd ever use Oracle products and wanted to negotiate a cheaper license, this the type of "news piece" I'd publish! (and it wouldn't even have to be "a lie" people experiment with OS all day since they're hiring "just" "5 engineers" it can be seen as a "small scale" (for Salesforce bien sur...) too)
- Tawheed 14y agoThis is obviously Step 2 of many to wean off of Oracle's hardware, infrastructure and software which Salesforce undoubtedly has been running on since Day 1 but now can no longer afford to do so for strategic reasons.