Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

archives.postgresql.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#31

Post by miah_ »

spidaman wrote: post #17
kami8845 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually hiring 50 people sounds more like a decisive plan than "exploring a strategic bet".

The posting says they're hiring only 5 now, 40-50 next year;I inferred they're still in an exploratory phase because if they were all in, they'd be hiring more than 5 now. The posting doesn't say they're doing a migration but having worked on Oracle -> PostgreSQL migrations and sharded database infrastructures, it makes sense.

Having worked at Salesforce I can say they take _forever_ to move on anything. When I left the company two years ago they were just starting to talk about Postgresql as a option to replace Oracle..

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#32

Post by riledhel »

pjscott wrote: post #14
mmaunder wrote: post #7

This is why. Every time I launch MySQL client: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 1024604 Server version: 5.1.63-0ubuntu0.10.04.1-log (Ubuntu) Copyright (c) 2000, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

If you're sick of seeing that message, MariaDB is a non-Oracle fork of MySQL, and I hear good things about it. http://mariadb.org/

Percona Server http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server and Drizzle http://www.drizzle.org/ are suitable replacements as well.

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#33

Post by miah_ »

pjscott wrote: post #13
rabidsnail wrote: post #4

Reminder: Salesforce owns Heroku

They do say, though, that the job is to "Design and implement major pieces of the salesforce.com core database infrastructure". That doesn't sound like they're talking about Heroku, at least not as the main reason for their hiring spree.

All of Salesforce production uses Oracle.. It costs them some serious $$$. Oracle is one of Salesforces competitors.

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#34

Post by DrStalker »

kami8845 wrote: post #23
spidaman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The posting says they're hiring only 5 now, 40-50 next year;I inferred they're still in an exploratory phase because if they were all in, they'd be hiring more than 5 now. The posting doesn't say they're doing a migration but having worked on Oracle -> PostgreSQL migrations and sharded database infrastructures, it makes sense.

Of course nothing is ever final, but publicly announcing something like this is already sort of a "fuck you" to Oracle, so I'd be surprised if they weren't a 100% sure of their plans to switch.

Or they're after more leverage in their dealing with Oracle.

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#35

Post by spidaman »

I use MySQL plenty and there's a lot of things I like about it. But I honestly don't understand any of the MySQL related comments on this post. Even if Oracle didn't own MySQL, a migration from Oracle to MySQL is significantly more difficult than one from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The poor join performance of MySQL make it doubtful that it could have ever been a serious discussion at Salesforce (to say nothing of the merits of mvcc and PostgreSQL's license).

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#38

Post by andrewcooke »

055static wrote: post #30

Please clarify: Is [a-zA-Z]*SQL a query language or is it software (i.e. an implementation of an interpreter for a language)?

if i understand what you're asking then i think you'd call it an implementation. both mysql and postgresql are database implementations that can be queried using the sql language. however, both also extend the language (as defined by ansi standard) in various ways.

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#39

Post by mason55 »

tlogan wrote: post #16
cs702 wrote: post #15

With Oracle slowly transforming MySQL into a 'free-open-core, closed-outer-shell' RDBMS[1], PostgreSQL is quickly becoming the main go-to alternative for anyone who wants to avoid database vendor lock-in. Hopefully SalesForce will contribute its improvements back to the PostgreSQL community. -- [1] For example, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797

And then Oracle will buy Salesforce... Larry did say something like that but he said that the price is too high. Here is my predictions: Salesforce is will start investing into new technologies and building cool stuff. However, that will not look good on stock price because R&D costs will skyrocket - and our "efficient" stock market does not like long term visions. The stock price will collapse. The board will panic…

Larry and the Oracle execs truly hate SFDC. They really build up the rivalry internally to Oracle employees and paint Salesforce as the big rival that everyone needs to band together to beat. Combined with the duplication of products that would occur if Oracle acquired Salesforce I would be beyond shocked if it ever happened. At that point Salesforce would be so irrelevant that it wouldn't matter.

Re: Salesforce will hire 40-50 Postgres people

#40

Post by mason55 »

codexon wrote: post #29
mmaunder wrote: post #7

This is why. Every time I launch MySQL client: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 1024604 Server version: 5.1.63-0ubuntu0.10.04.1-log (Ubuntu) Copyright (c) 2000, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

What's the significance of this? Will Oracle shut down MySQL developement?

Oracle and Salesforce (or at least Larry Ellison and Mark Benioff) are huge rivals. Anything Mark can do to fuck over Oracle is a plus in Salesforce's book. So moving all of Salesforce off Oracle DB technology (Orcale + MySQL) would be a huge middle finger to them.
Post reply on HN