Date -2010-05-19 NTT and EnterpriseDB Contribute Code to Support Postgres Ecosystem and Encourage Further Development of Extensible Cluster Technology
Jointly developed Postgres-XC to extend Postgres performance, reliability and scalability
TOKYO and WESTFORD, Mass. - May 19, 2010 - Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) (NYSE: NTT), the largest telecommunications company in Japan, and EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, today announced that they have jointly developed Postgres-XC (eXtensible Cluster) technology that will provide greater scalability and encourage further Postgres development. Postgres-XC, which is freely available under open source licensing, will be introduced to the larger Postgres community tomorrow at the Postgres Conference 2010 in Ottawa, Canada.
"This is what open source development is all about," said Matt Asay, COO at Canonical. "Joint development of technology based on a real-world use case is what makes open source software so successful. By contributing this technology to the larger open source community for further development, EnterpriseDB and NTT are providing building blocks for significant enhancements to Postgres."
Based upon the open source Postgres code and utilizing the same application programming interface, Postgres-XC is a write-scalable synchronous multi-master Postgres cluster with both read and write-scalability. Designed to greatly increase Postgres' scalability and reliability, Postgres-XC is being contributed to the open source community for further development in order to leverage the rapidly growing Postgres ecosystem of developers, partners and end-users. Postgres-XC, which is still in its early development stage, already includes significant feature functionality including Global Transaction Management and proven scalability.
Global Transaction Management
Existing open source database clusters have been capable of scaling out data-read performance by replicating the master database for parallel data access, but scaling out data-write performance has been a serious challenge, since multiple data-write processes need to be ordered consistently and smartly in order to avoid degrading the performance. Consequently, the performance of business applications containing transactional processes have not been scaled out by open source database clusters. Historically, customers have been forced to either purchase expensive commercial database clusters or to completely rebuild their applications.
Postgres-XC's Global Transaction Management, which controls multiple transactions distributed over clustered database nodes, dramatically improves both data-read and data-write performances. It does so by adding clustered database nodes instead of requiring modification to the application itself. Postgres-XC enables the transparent scaling out of the performance of transactional applications.
Proven Scalability
A benchmark test, which was operated over 10 general-purpose servers (10 clustered database nodes) with EC-site simulation, resulted in achieving 83 percent performance per server compared to a single database node. In many commercial database clusters, dedicated high performance processors or costly shared storage are required for scaling out the performance. Postgres-XC provides significant scaling advantages over general-purpose servers.
"Postgres-XC is a joint project by NTT and EnterpriseDB created to enhance the high availability and scalability of Postgres, so that it can be more easily deployed in operations and business support systems and in-the-cloud service infrastructures. NTT has been contributing to the Postgres Global Development Group for years by providing new features and improving quality. Consequently, our research engineer, Takahiro Itagaki, in the Open Source Software Center (NTT OSSC) was selected as one of the major contributors by the Group. We'll continuously spend our efforts to contribute to the open source communities," said Noritaka Uji, senior executive vice president, NTT.
EnterpriseDB and NTT previously announced a partnership in which the two companies shared their intention to collaborate with the goal of enhancing and extending Postgres, specifically in the areas of scalability and high availability, which are of particular importance in large-scale distributed database environments in data centers. Postgres-XC is one such result of this collaboration.
"Enterprise database users want control back and to get it they need new open source alternatives to their most expensive database spend. This is what Postgres-XC promises to deliver," said Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB. "It has always been our core mission to promote and expand the use of Postgres, which is why we have partnered with NTT to develop Postgres-XC. The contribution of this code to the community will greatly expand the Postgres ecosystem and further solidify Postgres as the most complete, cost-effective, enterprise-class database."
Postgres-XC is being contributed to the open source community to provide users and developers an opportunity to utilize the code, advance its development and provide valuable feedback to promote additional development. Codes and documents are available at: http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/.
EnterpriseDB's Mason Sharp and NTT's Kiochi Suzuki will host a joint technical session at the Postgres Conference 2010 on Friday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m. ET. For more information visit: http://www.pgcon.org/2010/schedule/events/226.en.html.
About NTT
The NTT Group has led the development of telecommunications in Japan for more than a century. The major companies that comprise the NTT Group continue to accommodate the emerging needs of the ubiquitous broadband society in the 21st century, while fulfilling their social mission in each business field in an increasingly competitive global market environment.
NTT founded NTT OSSC in April 2006 to provide support services and technical information about open source software to the NTT family of companies and to contribute to open source communities. NTT OSSC has been promoting the deployment of PostgreSQL in the NTT family of companies and has contributed advanced features and bug reports to the PostgreSQL community.
About EnterpriseDB Corporation
EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, provides enterprise-class PostgreSQL products and PostgreSQL services to help IT organizations be successful with the world's most advanced open source database. The company's Postgres Plus products are ideally suited for transaction-intensive applications requiring superior performance, massive scalability and compatibility with proprietary database products to reduce overall database costs. EnterpriseDB has offices in North America, Europe and Asia. The company was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Westford, Mass. For more information, please call +1-978-589-5709, or visit www.enterprisedb.com.
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EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus are trademarks of EnterpriseDB Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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Takeshi Tachi
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
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