As Tim Bray says, this has been an interesting week. Not just because of the Web 2.0 conference that I wish I was at, but because there are some very interesting things happening in the software world. While there’s lots we could talk about, I wanted to be sure and flag a couple of different items.
- First, there was Tim’s boss, Sun’s EVP Software John Loiacono, pontificating on the opportunities around the database market – and calling out Postgres, interestingly. Most observers – yours truly included – have tended to focus on Mickos’ MySQL at the expense of competing open source projects. This is not without cause, as MySQL’s rocketed towards ubiquity in a remarkably short span of time, but the fact is that other products have continued to innovate in MySQL’s shadow. Postgres is one of these, from all accounts. I was chatting with a Friend of RedMonk today on just that topic coincidentally, and he reported that for a particular query Postgres was returning a result in less than a third the time that MySQL required. Now while that information needs to be qualified in that it’s entirely possible – even probable – that MySQL will outperform Postgres in other tasks. But it’s a helpful reminder that ubiquity != technical superiority.
- Perhaps even more interesting from a database – or more accurately information management – perspective was this couple of weeks old note linked to this week by approximately a thousand people. The idea? That Adam was correct: RSS/Atom has a shot at becoming the next HTML; that is to say the simple, sloppy, scalable format of data capture. What’s even more interesting than that Mark Pilgrim sees this future as only weeks away. Certainly bears watching.
- Lastly, kudos to the Zimbra team for getting a hell of a lot of attention the past week or so. When I wrote them up in mid-August, I did so largely based on the fact that a.) I believed that there was still a lot of room in messaging/calendaring for innovation, and b.) their client was very impressive. Well, it seems that I’m not the only one to think so. In the link above, Tim weighs in with his thoughts, and Sleepycat’s Mike Olson also got some kind words for them here. As I posted on Mike’s blog, seems like Funambol should have a role to play in the need for device syncing. While I’m on the topic of calendaring, it’s worth mentioning that the rumors of a Google Calendar application are accelerating.
Lots more interesting news to report, but that’ll do for right now.
