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Comment by petergeoghegan | Hacker News Reader

> To announce such a big contribution to Postgres, and be it open sourced when published, is very welcome

But the source code hasn't been published. As I said to you today on pgsq-hackers, that's why it hasn't been taken seriously - that's just how it works.

> But there's still some worry that it would become one, one day

Who are you attributing that concern to, exactly?

You're basically claiming that it will be a great opportunity. But you're also claiming that it might be an existential crisis. Do I have that right?

Have you considered the possibility that it might actually be neither of those two things?

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> that's just how it works.

And maybe that's just how it shouldn't. Technology moves fast, very fast. Markets do so. Users, you get it. Competing technologies, undeniably.

To delay a discussion for months just because the source is not published is in my opinion only reflecting on part of the opportunity/problem. I'm calling for an strategic discussion, which is higher level than a code-only, limited, partial analysis.

> Have you considered the possibility that it might actually be neither of those two things?

Sure thing, like anything in life, it may be neither. But what I know for sure is that a) we as the PostgreSQL Community need to mitigate risks and plan for them; b) leverage (or transform into!) opportunities as soon as we identify them.

> I'm calling for an strategic discussion

There is practically no information about Babelfish available to analyze. You can currently request a preview of Babelfish if you have an AWS account, though I'm not aware of anyone having even that level of access. There is a single page placeholder on a Github.io that says "Babelfish for PostgreSQL will be available on Github in 2021".

And so I genuinely don't know what a strategic discussion really means here. How much can be decided about something based on a vague press release?

There is information about Babelfish, including reInvent keynote, website and other sources. Here you have a 30min session about Babelfish for PostgreSQL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcGMoxPCNcQ

I'd also love to have more, architectural/design documents, the code itself, etc, and I'm sure they will be sooner than later released.

But that doesn't prevent us, as I said, to discuss the items I suggested above. They do not depend on the source code, at all.

And independently of this, there is already one thread on the -hackers mailing list that provides some information and proposes to introduce a technical improvement that not only would ease the Babelfish integration, but will also provide significant benefits for PostgreSQL itself, allowing for other protocols to come (including a potential v4 and an HTTP-based protocol): https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAGBW59d5SjLyJLt-jwNv%...

It is interesting to think about this in the abstract, but I think that Peter is right. The real collaboration only comes with getting the code published, design proposals on extension points in the core engine, and so on.

This isn't the sort of thing that is decided with blog posts, but personally I am glad to see there is interest in this project.

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