“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edison

And we have been hard at work since my last post.  Demand for Postgres has been overwhelming.  I said in my first blog, we will only be limited by capacity, not opportunity. Upon reflection, that seems like an incredible grasp of the obvious.

We were very well received at the MySQL User’s Group meeting in Oracle’s NYC Headquarters.  If you missed it, you can watch the event here.  They even gave away some cool Sun Microsystems Logo collector’s items!

For those J2EE, Red Hat, and JBoss fans in the crowd, EnterpriseDB helped push their ISV Certifications over the 500-count mark.   Further solidifying that Postgres is the database of choice for Java developers.

Today, EnterpriseDB and NTT announced the open source project: Postgres-XC (eXtensible cluster).  Learn more about it by attending our very own Mason Sharp’s and NTT Kiochi Suzuki’s joint technical session at the Postgres Conference 2010 on Friday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m. ET.  I am heading up to the conference early tomorrow morning just in time to help host the PGCon 2010 Major Social Event! Please join us if you are in Ottawa.

“Some dude just handed me a Postgres t-shirt. Why is he even at this conference?”

The above line was my favorite tweet from The 2010 O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo.  I wasn’t at the show, but Sean Doherty, EnterpriseDB’s Vice President of Business Development couldn’t resist the opportunity to speak with attendees about Postgres.  Bold and brazen, Sean entered the Santa Clara Hyatt with a box of 200 “Postgres is In” t-shirts.  He brought reinforcements with him, concerned that he wouldn’t have enough time to hand them all out.  Within two minutes of opening the box, a line of conference attendees formed through the lobby of the Santa Clara Hyatt to get a shirt.  Ten minutes later, the Postgres t-shirts were gone.  No reinforcements needed.  Sean Doherty is a “dude” and our hero.

There was a not so subtle difference to the conference this year over last.  I watched several of the talks online after the conference was over.  Many interesting sessions that were not centered on MySQL were held, including Drizzle, MariaDB, and No-SQL.   As I viewed Edward Screven’s State of the Dolphin keynote online (after I noticed what a nice job Mark Matthew’s did in his demo) the background stunned me.  There was a large bold “O’Reilly” sign centered on the stage.  In the video, you barely ever saw MySQL signage at all.  Compare that to the 2009 conference keynotes and you will see a big difference.  Building on this theme, Tim O’Reilly nailed it in an interesting talk on the future of “Open Source and Open Data in the Cloud.”

So maybe it was not so weird to receive a Postgres t-shirt at the show after all. Maybe the weird thing was that Postgres community did not participate in this show.  Maybe Tim should consider renaming the show next year to The 2011 O’Reilly Open Data, Postgres, and MySQL Conference & Expo.  I think I know where he could find the Founding Sponsor. 😉

Puddin’head Wilson was ahead of his time.

One of joys of looking for a new job is the ability to meet people and explore technologies that you may otherwise not.  I was completely open to all opportunities: big companies and small, public and private, established and stealth mode startups.  I spent some time with the smart folks at Rapid7, a leading provider of unified vulnerability management, compliance and penetration testing solutions.  That’s where I learned about Metasploit, an open source project created to provide information about exploit techniques through a knowledge base and tools for security professionals.

A recent post describes a fingerprinting technique to determine the identity of a PostgeSQL server when you don’t have credentials to the database.  Check it out here:  http://blog.metasploit.com/2010/02/postgres-fingerprinting.html.

Did you know that in the days of Mark Twain, fingerprinting was not considered to be an acceptable form of forensic science?  In fact, Twain’s novel, Puddn’head Wilson, was titled after a character that liked to collect fingerprints as a hobby.  In a dramatic ending, Wilson solves the murder mystery by matching fingerprints.

Join us in NYC at the MySQL Users Group

Yes,  you read that right.  It is not a typo.   I will be attending the MySQL Users Group meeting tomorrow at 6pm at Oracle (NYC Headquarters).  Our fearless CEO and Red Sox fan, Ed Boyajian, will bravely enter Yankee territory to discuss PostgreSQL vs MySQL.  An event not to be missed!

Do you think we are going to need body guards?

Keep Ski Tips Up….Prepare To Unload

Analogy: a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based.

One of my Sun colleagues correctly pointed out that I use analogies constantly.  So why not start my blog with one?  One of my favorite things to do is ski.  It is an incredible feeling to arrive at the top of the chair lift the day after a big storm.  Bright sunshine, clear blue sky, crisp clean air, and fresh snow awaits.   The mountain is beautiful and its time lay to down some fresh tracks.   There are so many options.  Choose your own path and make your mark.  It is exhilarating!

I find myself feeling the same way about my new job leading Products and Marketing at EnterpriseDB, The Enterprise Postgres Company.  So how does a person who helped Sun acquire MySQL end up working with PostgreSQL?  It is simple: people, products and market opportunity.   I have long been a fan of open source.  Open source is not just a cost effective solution for the IT manager, it is by far the best way to develop enterprise software.   Outside the firewall with nowhere to hide, wicked smaht (as we say here in Boston) developers and users collaborate to create better software.  Many of the PostgreSQL contributors have chosen to work at EnterpriseDB:  Bruce Momjian, Dave Page, Heikki Linnakangas, Korry Douglas, Pavan Deolasee and Robert Haas (about to come on board).  Several open source business leaders have also chosen to come to EnterpriseDB including Red Hat veterans Ed Boyajian, Jay Barrows and Sean Doherty. In the last few years, the market has consolidated.  IT managers created their data centers to be heterogeneous and now they find themselves being served by one vendor.  Customers want choice.  PostgreSQL is an enterprise class, open source object-relational database and will be that choice.

The best open source product with the right commercial backing will always win.  EnterpriseDB has a dream team that will only be limited by capacity, not opportunity.   I am flattered to be a part of this team.