On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Al Hulaton wrote:
> After seeing this article yesterday, I did a bit of research. One _big_ reason
> why Sourceforge/VA/OSDN is moving over to IBM/Webshere/DB2 from PostgreSQL is
> the resulting product will be jointly marketed by Sourceforge and IBM's
> zillions of sales people. So not only will they get a shiny, new db, but
> backend revenue.
>
> "The companies will jointly market and sell the software as part of the
> commercial agreement. "-- 4th paragraph, last sentence.
> http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=30025,00.asp
>
> "In a separate announcement today, VA Software announced a significant
> commercial agreement with IBM focused on the joint marketing and sales of the
> next generation of SourceForge⢠Enterprise Edition." -- 7th paragram from
> their press release at
> http://www.vasoftware.com/news/press.php/2002/1070.html
>
> Perhaps the PostgreSQL team bidding for the job, if any were even consulted,
> didn't frame the project as IBM did -- a product joint venture. It's a good
> tactic and I don't blame Sourceforge one bit for the opportunity.
>
> The decision wasn't entirely technical so I don't see this as a loss for
> PostgreSQL. DB2 isn't a slouch db by any means but not many companies will be
> able to bargain with IBM as Sourceforge did. If you're a retailer in Topeka
> with 3 locations, I doubt IBM would give you the same attention or joint
> marketing deal they gave Sourceforge. DB2 ain't cheap.
Actually, I remember quite clearly the incredibly bad performance of
sourceforge's search engine for the better part of a year after switching
out postgresql for db2. It had been quite snappy, and I could enter
database or some other keyword and have a page display in ~2 seconds or
less. For the first three months or so after the switch, most searchs
simply timed out to PHP's default 30 seconds. Even when they got it
working better, it only had maybe 1/10th or less of the keywords indexed
that they had had in postgresql (i.e. words like index or email weren't
being indexed. :-)
It was probably at least 9 months later that the search engine was finally
back to being usable, and another 3 or 4 before it was about as good as
postgresql. And we're talking an older version (I believe it was 7.1) of
postgresql as well.
The switch to db2 was driven by partnering business needs, not by poor
performance of postgresql.
