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Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

babelfishpg.org

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Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#11

Post by snerbles »

XorNot wrote: post #6

Well this is a big deal for me: my father has run his business off a sprawling MS Access application which I've struggled at various times to try and move to something more modern with no success. I wonder if this will work for connecting to MS Access directly.

If the MS Access application is backed by an actual MS SQL server, maybe. But if (and in my experience this is more likely) it uses MS Access itself with MDB files (Microsoft's Jet database engine - imagine SQLite but inferior in every conceivable way), you're probably better off writing a tool in .NET or similar to migrate the data.

In a past job supporting an industrial controls firm, I wrote an interactive merge tool for AutoCAD Electrical parts catalog files (hideous little MDBs behind the scenes)...it was an unholy clusterfuck of C#, Lucene, NodeJS, and a smidgen of VueJS on the frontend. Not my proudest work, but it sure beat the usual tasks involving VBA in FactoryTalk.

Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#15

Post by setr »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #12
manishsharan wrote: post #9

I don't see any enterprise customer using this. MS SQL server is relatively cheap. Now if this thing can work for Oracle or IBM DB2 , then may be it will be worth the risk.

PostgreSQL already supports Oracle DB dialect and protocol, I thought?

postgres takes a lot of design inspiration from Oracle, but AFAIK has never made any real attempt at being strictly compatible with it.

You might be thinking of dblink in oracle's world, and foreign data wrapper (fdw) in postgres, which at least lets you transparently interact between the two for just DQL. DDL, procedural logic, etc definitely differs.

Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#16

Post by jabl »

setr wrote: post #15
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostgreSQL already supports Oracle DB dialect and protocol, I thought?

postgres takes a lot of design inspiration from Oracle, but AFAIK has never made any real attempt at being strictly compatible with it. You might be thinking of dblink in oracle's world, and foreign data wrapper (fdw) in postgres, which at least lets you transparently interact between the two for just DQL. DDL, procedural logic, etc definitely differs.

There's also EnterpriseDB, a commercial version of PostgreSQL that has added support for the Oracle SQL dialect, including the stored proc language (pl/SQL or whatever it's called).

I don't think it speaks the Oracle wire protocol though.

Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#17

Post by mrweasel »

manishsharan wrote: post #9

I don't see any enterprise customer using this. MS SQL server is relatively cheap. Now if this thing can work for Oracle or IBM DB2 , then may be it will be worth the risk.

Those customers also know how to manage SQL Server, and the software running on won’t support Postgresql with Babelfish, in the sense that any support contract goes right out the window.

I think this is mostly for companies that run Postgresql, but need to bring in a single application which only supports SQL Server.

I wonder if you can make SQL Management Studio run against Babelfish.

Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#18

Post by kardianos »

data_ders wrote: post #8

as a user of TSQL in a MSFT/Azure shop, I feel increasingly isolated from other dialects. Virtually all other databases these days use a dialect that's closer to PostGres. Does TSQL have a future? If you don't have legacy dbs and you have a choice of dbs, would TSQL ever make sense to use today?

T-SQL has huge warts, but is one of the better procedural SQL languages I've used. TDS (the wire protocol) also has warts, but it is vastly superior to the pg wire v3 protocol. Lastly, T-SQL is a single, integrated language, which means you can go from basic SQL to procedural SQL in the same batch. T-SQL also has first class support for multiple result sets which is very useful. T-SQL and TDS both support named parameters, where as PG only supports ordinal position.

Yes, it has a future.

Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#19

Post by ahachete »

manishsharan wrote: post #9

I don't see any enterprise customer using this. MS SQL server is relatively cheap. Now if this thing can work for Oracle or IBM DB2 , then may be it will be worth the risk.

> MS SQL server is relatively cheap

At $14K/core [0] for the Enterprise edition, it doesn't fit exactly on my definition of cheap. Sure, it's 1/4th of Oracle's price, but still translates to 6-7 figures for even small deployments, which again is not cheap to me.

But I guess the main attractiveness for current SQL Server uses might be more on the licensing terms/compliance problems than the cost. Just trying to understand how to license SQL Server and how cores are counted already requires you to read a 42-page guide [1]. The risks associated from incorrectly purchasing licenses for your SQL Server cluster(s) may be a compelling reason to jump into open source with minimal migration costs (at least compared to migrating directly to Postgres or any other open source database).

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2019-p... [1]: https://download.microsoft.com/download/e/2/9/e29a9331-965d-...

Re: Open-Source Babelfish for Postgres

#20

Post by eb0la »

jabl wrote: post #16
setr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

postgres takes a lot of design inspiration from Oracle, but AFAIK has never made any real attempt at being strictly compatible with it. You might be thinking of dblink in oracle's world, and foreign data wrapper (fdw) in postgres, which at least lets you transparently interact between the two for just DQL. DDL, procedural logic, etc definitely differs.

There's also EnterpriseDB, a commercial version of PostgreSQL that has added support for the Oracle SQL dialect, including the stored proc language (pl/SQL or whatever it's called). I don't think it speaks the Oracle wire protocol though.

No, it doesn't speak the Oracle wire protocol. But the Oracle pl/slq (source code compatibility) from Postgres was ported to DB2 and IBM claims 100% compatibility.
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