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Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

citusdata.com

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Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#71

Post by gtrubetskoy »

tspiteri wrote: post #51
X86BSD wrote: post #31

AGPL? This is dead in the water :( It will never be integrated into PG. What a shame. It should have been a 2 clause BSDL. Sigh.

The BSDL does not make much economic sense to the company open sourcing their code; a new competitor would fork the code, make closed improvements, and merge any changes from the open source code. That means that the competitor is always gaining by a one-way flow of improvements. To use open source code, the more permissive the license the better. But to actually open your own code, BSDL is a very tough sell. That's…

>> The BSDL does not make much economic sense to the company open sourcing their code

If this were true then Cloudera, Horton and a whole bunch of other companies would be out of business, yet in reality they are doing really well. All that AGPL is doing for Citus is:

1. Turning away people (customers) who are religious about licenses.

2. Eliminating any possibility of this code ever being integrated into PostgreSQL

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#72

Post by craigkerstiens »

faizshah wrote: post #56
frn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenplum is based on postgres 8.2, with the featureset you'd expect from pg 8.2 - basically none of the additions after 2006 have merged to GP.

Ok, and what's the process like for disaster recovery with citus?

That depends on your setup, for the master instance you'd run it just as you would for other setups. Streaming replication is common there. For the sharded instances, Citus has the ability for you to set what your replication factor is. Here Citus is then aware of when a node fails and will automatically redistribute the data to a new node, essentially taking care of that for you.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#73

Post by davidfetter »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #18
exhilaration wrote: post #6

AGPL license if anyone's curious: https://github.com/citusdata/citus/blob/master/LICENSE

Which means there is no chance this would ever become part of PostgreSQL proper.

Citus owns the copyrights, and the CLA ensures that they will continue to. That means that they can reassign it under a different license if they so choose, and they could at some point choose a liberal license.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#74

Post by reitanqild »

jgreen10 wrote: post #63
reitanqild wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB used to distribute drivers under a more permissive license for this exact reason IIRC.

Well, applications that want to use Citus can just use whichever PostgreSQL client is available.

Thanks, twists my head but as far as I see it could work.- IANAL

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#75

Post by tracker1 »

batbomb wrote: post #67
ozgune wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Ozgun from Citus Data) We're working on making Citus masterless. In all openness, we evaluated two different approaches to this in the past six months, and wrapped up the design for one. This design works well on the cloud, and we already demonstrated a working version: https://youtu.be/_nun2S6EdWo?t=411 For on-premise deployments, the primary challenge is set-up complexity. We're now prototyping one of those design…

Can Citus handle geospatial sharding?

You could always compute a geohash and use that as a shard key... I'm not familiar enough with Citus' specific approach here, but using a limited geohash would give you close to what you're looking for.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#76

Post by reitanqild »

parenthephobia wrote: post #50
reitanqild wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know it means it is contagious over the network. If not I have misread and quite a few other people have misunderstood as well I guess. See for example MongoDB and others that distribute the core under AGPL and the drivers under MIT or something so that you can actually use it for something without having to make your product AGPL licensed as well. Edit: did some quick googling and found this in another H…

That might be what some companies have in mind, but those companies are wrong to use the AGPL because that isn't what the license says. I don't really know how one could read the AGPL and think that it requires clients to be AGPLed. The only difference between the AGPL and GPL, other than the name, is that the AGPL requires you to offer to provide the source of your modified version of the software to all of its user…

  Note that MongoDB's drivers are MIT-licensed
  because they are made "part of" the client
  software. (A)GPL virality would come into play
  for drivers incorporated into clients.
OK. Makes sense. I might have misunderstood in which case I feel I almost owe GNU some kind of apology. If I become convinced I can at least try to add that fact to later discussions about AGPL.

That said it seems more than one company thinks it is viral over the net (Odoo, OPA comes to mind) and I would really be interested if someone who really understands licenses would explain.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#77

Post by atonse »

SwellJoe wrote: post #36
atonse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hunch is that the two are not really related. Companies of any appreciable size will be happy to pay for support if they choose to make Citus a part of their critical infrastructure. And the industry reached an inflection point where there are enough companies want as much of their infrastructure to be open source as possible, that you can run a company where most of your stuff is open source, while still making a…

I know Red Hat is making a ton of money. But, CoreOS and Docker, are they at the "making a ton of money" stage, or merely well-funded by investors?

Good point. I wondered if I should edit that specific part, but kept it anyway.

But a sign of getting investors is also that they see that there's still potential of making a lot of money, in spite of being open source.

That's true here too. Citus mentioned they spoke to their board (and presumably their investors too) about this change.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#78

Post by gtaylor »

onRoadAgain23 wrote: post #12

Being burned before,I will never use an OS infrastructure project that has enterprise features you need to pay for. They always try to move you to paid and make the OSS version unpleasant to use over time as soon as the bean counters take over to milk you "For customers with large production deployments, we also offer an enterprise edition that comes with additional functionality"

What are some alternatives for paying their employees to develop these products that are 100% free? There are some excellent commercial organizations that drive some of the tech that many or even most of us have came to rely on. This goes all the way down to Linux and BSD itself.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#79

Post by ccleve »

I'd very much like to see what algorithm these systems are using to enable transactions in a distributed environment. Are they just using straight two-phase commit, and letting the whole transaction fail if a single server goes down? Or are are they getting fancy and doing some kind of replication with consensus?

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#80

Post by cowardlydragon »

devit wrote: post #60

I've been unable to find any clear description of the capabilities of Citus and competing solutions (postgres-x2 seems the other leader). Which of these are supported: 1. Full PostgreSQL SQL language 2. All isolation levels including Serializable (in the sense that they actually provide the same guarantees as normal PostgreSQL) 3. Never losing any committed data on sub-majority failures (i.e. synchronous replication)…

But if they answer those questions, you won't buy support/use it...

Have a donut and look at our marketing spreadsheets.

I'm so tired of "seamless" "effortless" "simple" distributed database lies. There's mathematical theorems as to why there is no free lunch.

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