MySQL and PostgreSQL

Matt Asay posted a very interesting comment on communities behind MySQL and PostgreSQL. In a nutshell, it reports an evidence of a strong PostgreSQL community.

I made a foray into the PostgreSQL territory 1-2 years ago. What I discovered was a solid product and a vibrant community.

For the next year or so I had been trying to sell it to a number of enterprise customers I worked with - with no success. As this was kind of puzzling, I did my due diligence in trying to figure out the reasons. Eventually I came up to two things that seemed to be important:

1. Low brand awareness in the enterprise. A not-too-unusual management response to a proposition to use PostgreSQL is “post-what?”. A product that bills itself as an enterprise-quality database should promote its brand accordingly.
2. Vague strategy of building a community of loyal enterprise developers who could demonstrate their proficiency in the technology in terms understandable by the management. I’m talking about certifications. There was an attempt to create a certification program for PostgreSQL but it didn’t seem to pan out.

MySQL excels at either of the above. Not only is its name known to every first respondent but also does it have an excellent certification program. That’s exactly how you social-market yourself in the enterprise. That’s exactly how you sell yourself for a billion.

Does Java Matter in Web 2.0 Era?

Java is strong in the enterprise. This is one of my favorite facts as I’m an enterprise software engineer.

A few years ago a friend of mine enlightened me on why Google is said to compete with Microsoft. Since then I started watching the thing that’s commonly referred to as Web 2.0.

To my surprise, the longer I watched the more apparent it became that Java is far from dominating Web 2.0 world, to put it mildly. There’s a good part of Web 2.0 stream that can be considered low end from the enterprise viewpoint. Fast and cost-effective development cycle, commodity hardware and/or hosting are valued most in the stream. Java did not deliver either.

Fortunately, there were people who noticed that before me. Spring and Hibernate became mainstream Java technologies, Sun realized there are processors beyond SPARC and operating systems beyond Solaris, and Java went open source. However, an important element was still missing - a RAD framework that could compete with RoR or PHP/MySQL duo.

Here comes Grails. Released a few weeks ago, the framework is a vital element in remaking Java. Built on top of agile, robust, and reliable frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate and having Groovy dynamic language at its core, the framework provides much needed development speed and easy lightweight container deployment option.

Yes, Java does matter in Web 2.0 era. It’s the leveraging of open source technologies what makes Java a viable option for Web 2.0 startups and the things promise to get even better here.