What is EnterpriseDB? Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

I first discovered EnterpriseDB in May 2005.  It was in beta when I read a description of it in an on-line news article.  I decided to download the database and give it a test run.  I wrote about that experience on my blog.

I will give you some highlights here but you can use Google and read the whole article if you'd like to:

         Type the following string into the Google search engine to find more information:          enterprisedb my first look lewisc

The very first thing I noticed was that EnterpriseDB did not support packages.  As a long time Oracle developer, everything I code is encapsulated in packages.  It is just good programming practice.  Not having packages did not bode well.

After a little further research, I discovered that it also did not support user-defined functions.  I was kind of bummed out by that.  Not much in the way of compatibility as far as I could tell.

However, in this very early beta product they already supported PL/SQL style syntax, as opposed to PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL syntax, provided excellent trigger support and, much to my surprise, DBMS_OUTPUT existed and worked like I expected.

I took a second look at it for Beta 2 in July 2005.   In this short time span, user defined functions became supported and ETL services and Replication were added.   That was a very positive sign for me.  Not only that they added the functionality that quickly but also that they were addressing the high priority issues first.

EnterpriseDB has continued to improve regularly.  The basics are all there.  Package support has been added. 

I want to make the point here that Oracle has been working on PL/SQL for 15 years or more.  EnterpriseDB is starting SPL from scratch.  They do get the benefit of an educated development community asking for the important stuff but it is all new coding for the database.  Eventually everything will be there but it does not happen overnight.

In some of my reviews of the product, I ran into issues with compatibility.  In one case, the documentation was not clear and in another I had a data type mismatch, kind of a PostgreSQL vs. Oracle way of looking at things.  Support was very helpful in clearing it up for me. 

Migrating trivial applications between major databases is no big deal for the most part.  In my professional career, though, I have worked on very few trivial applications.

My concern, and I think the concern of anyone thinking of migrating, is how compatible is it and what are my options when I hit something that does not compute? 

EnterpriseDB has been available for only a couple of years, and only one year of that was not as a beta product.  In that time it has added massive amounts of Oracle compatible functionality.  With the addition of packages in 2006, on top of the already existing SQL and PL/SQL syntax compatibility, my reservations about EnterpriseDB have been removed.  EnterpriseDB is already mostly compatible and that compatibility is getting stronger every day.

I cover migrating in great detail later so that will not be covered here.  In the second half of this book, I examine many of the differences between Oracle and EnterpriseDB, in addition to many of the compatible points.

One thing I did in several of my reviews was to check the effectiveness of support.  As I said above, I did hit a few issues.  I opened some bug reports on the EnterpriseDB online forum and got a very fast response.  The support technicians were all knowledgeable and seemed eager to get me up and running.

I can say for a fact, the people at EnterpriseDB are eager to get EnterpriseDB as compatible as possible as quickly as possible.  I even had a chance to exchange emails with Denis Lussier, the EnterpriseDB architect and co-founder, and even more surprising, I exchanged some emails with Andy Astor, the CEO and co-founder.  That is what I call support!

So let me answer my own question, "What is EnterpriseDB?"  EnterpriseDB is a company.  EnterpriseDB, the company, produces a database also called EnterpriseDB. 

EnterpriseDB is a contributor to open source.  EnterpriseDB develops software, employs open source developers, and funds PostgreSQL work.  EnterpriseDB also offers improvements they make back to the PostgreSQL community.

EnterpriseDB is a high performance, enterprise class, Oracle compatible database.  It provides Oracle compatible syntax for SQL and PL/SQL, and in the hopefully near future, your OCI applications as well.  This compatibility extends to PostgreSQL and ANSI syntax.

EnterpriseDB also provides an enterprise class platform for all of your applications.  EnterpriseDB provides replication, system management tools, cross-platform developer tools, and migration tools.

EnterpriseDB is built on the decades of development of PostgreSQL and its ancestors.  That gives it enterprise class reliability and scalability. 

EnterpriseDB takes advantage of the extensive Oracle client and Oracle developer communities to assign the priorities to its roadmap.  EnterpriseDB is incorporating the enhancements and features that real-world customers want and need.

What EnterpriseDB is not may be more important.  It is NOT an Oracle clone.  The architecture is different as it is the PostgreSQL architecture with enhancements, the implementation of data types and operators is different, the object implementation is different, and the way you would partition a table is different.  However, the code syntax and the over all development environment is COMPATIBLE.  That is the key word.  The road to get there may not be the same but it is the same destination.

EnterpriseDB does not support 100% of everything Oracle does.  That may be the goal but at this time it does not.  I have found that there are workarounds for almost any issue you may have.  Just as the compatibility has seemed to increase exponentially over the last couple of years, I expect that over time we will find fewer and fewer missing pieces.

EnterpriseDB is not open source.  It is based on Open Source.  You can buy the source but you cannot sell the source.

 

 

This is an excerpt from the book "EnterpriseDB: The Definitive Reference" by Rampant TechPress.