Re: What Would You Like To Do? - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 09/13/2011 10:13 AM, Michael Nolan wrote:

The lists all seem to be focusing on the things that the developers
would like to add to PostgreSQL, what about some things that users or
ISPs might like to have, and thus perhaps something that companies might
actually see as worth funding?

But perhaps if a few 'commercial' features were on the wish list there would be more companies willing to fund development?   The developers get a bit of what they want to work on, the production users get a bit of what they need, everybody's happy. 

This is the difference between developers and real world users.  Real world users may not have the ability, time or resources to redesign their databases just because that's the 'best' way to do something.  Will it be the most efficient way to do it?  Almost certainly not. 

I've been involved in a few corporate mergers, and there was a short term need to do queries on the combined databases while the tiger team handling the IT restructuring figured out how (or whether) to merge the dabases together.  (One of these happened to be an Oracle/Oracle situation, it was a piece of cake even though the two data centers were 750 miles apart and the table structures had almost nothing in common.  Another was a two week headache, the third was even worse!)

In a perfect world, it would be nice if one could do combined queries linking a PostgreSQL database with an Oracle one, or a MySQL one, too.  Because sometimes, that's what you gotta do.  Even something that is several hundred times slower is going to be faster than merging the databases together.  When I do this today, I have to write a program (in perl or php) that accesses both databases and merges it by hand. 

>> 

Microsoft uses Linked servers.

DB/2 uses DB/2 Connect

Informix uses Informix Connect

Etc.

At CONNX, our product suite provides this ability generically from any data source collection.  It is obvious why such a thing is utterly mandatory for every large business.  For example:

The business purchases a CRM system for customer relationship management like SAP.

The business purchases a HCM system for Human Capital Management like Peoplesoft.

The business purchases a Manufacturing system like MAXIM for their manufacturing systems.

Etc., etc., etc.

Some of these systems may have the same database type, but it is highly unlikely that every solution to a business problem in the entire organization uses the same underlying database.

People buy or build software systems to solve their business problems.  There is a low probability that each and every business problem was solved by the same sets of tools from the same vendors.

Therefore, the ability to process queries across heterogeneous systems is a fundamental business need.

The larger the company the more database systems you will find.  But even teeny-tiny organizations tend to have several different database systems needed to run their business.

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