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Comment by jjirsa | Hacker News Reader

Good move, will be good for the database for sure. I think of this article [0] every time someone says "why not just use <some hipster database written by 2 people over the course of a year>":

Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars.

That’s if things go extremely well.

Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1.

0: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-marklogic-h...

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The reason is that Alibaba is stuck with mysql and complex queries being put very very deep inside their architecture.

And yes, things like top level transaction databases are like hand maintained clusters of 20 servers for the whole Alibaba with query caching servers in front of them to prevent OOMs

They tried to get rid of it many times as written in their tech blogs, but this probably indicates that they finally gave up on such endeavour, choosing to own Mysql instead

Their most sisyphean issue is the transaction locking. Imagine, 20 people trying to buy 19 trinkets, and you try to resolve transactions in a distributed DB, and two guys manage to buy the same thing in the exactly same nanosecond. The task is hard to tackle.

If you time-atomize the transaction, you get increase in minimal latency.

If you simply use a single server with very fast DB, you get reliability concerns.

With token ring locking, you get both.

And so on, so on, and on

Has Postgres received tens of millions of dollars in funding?

Yes, I think different companies invested that over the years. But perhaps more importantly it’s been 20+ years of development.

Not sure about the funding, but it has been around for 20+ years. Maybe not tens of millions in VC funding, but it definitely has tens of millions of dollars worth of devs spending time on it.

If you assume an average 10 person years of development effort over the 20 year history of Postgres, absolutely.

20 years * LoadedLaborCost (USD$150k/personyr) * 10 people

=>USD$30m.

I'd assume the amount of work contributed to PostgreSQL by people while being paid by companies to do so is substantial.

I think you could relate that to funding?

Likely through supporting organizations:

EnterpriseDB: $64.92M in 6 Rounds from 7 Investors https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/enterprisedb#/entity

Plus it is much more under development than 5-7 years.

It's received tens of millions of dollars of value in contributions, yes. Probably in large excess of that.

Likely. Last year the foundation they're a part of received $25,000 in earmarked donations for Postgres which you can extrapolate over the 30 years it's been around to be a million-ish [1]. They've also received several million dollars in subsidies by starting as an academic project at Berkley in the 80s.

[1]http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/

Not sure that much, but Ingres was a sponsored research project and many people who now work on Postgres are employed by a consultancy.

I think using Postgres would be completely valid (could be wrong though), the issue would be converting their code base, rather than any stability issue in pg.

Stupid. Having too many millions makes one careleß in using ðem. Impoßible to fix a bad architecture by þrowing money on it.

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