Open Source Weblog

When Pervasive joined the open source database market in January 2005 it promised to give users the confidence they were adopting database software that was backed by "a reputable source".

It's the sort of argument we hear many times from traditional software vendors looking to get into the open source market, or to persuade users to steer clear of an open source alternative.

'Companies are looking for a reputable support provider to stand behind an open source project and act as the throat to choke', we are told. That was Pervasive's plan to provide backing for the PostgreSQL database, but it didn't turn out that way.

"While we always knew that PostgreSQL is a solid product with advanced database capabilities and that it has a very real opportunity to shake up the high-end database market, we underestimated the high level of quality support and expertise already available within the PostgreSQL community," writes Pervasive president and CEO, John Farr, in an open letter to the PostgreSQL community.

"In this environment, we found that the opportunity for Pervasive Software to meaningfully increase adoption of PostgreSQL by providing an alternative source for support and services was quite limited. Accordingly, we have made the decision today to substantially curtail our focus on our PostgreSQL initiative," he adds.

In the letter Farr adds that Pervasive still believes in the potential for PostgreSQL and its potential to benefit as the market moves towards low-cost, high-performance software. He adds that the company will contribute any IP developed during its 18 months as a PostgreSQL business to the community, as well as whitepapers and other content.

Pervasive entered the open source database market at a time when there was clearly growing industry interest in PostgreSQL, an object-relational database management system, based on POSTGRES, which was developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department.

Open source database up-start EnterpriseDB entered the market in May that year to challenge open source rival MySQL, as well as the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Then data warehousing firm Greenplum built its offering on PostgreSQL, while Sun adopted PostgreSQL in November 2005.

It is Pervasive's work on Sun Solaris integration that will probably be remembered as the company's achievement during its Postgres flirtation. It launched Pervasive Postgres for Sun Solaris 10 in June last year and later made available to the community the code for probes for Sun's Dtrace monitoring framework.

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