Will AWS Babelfish Succeed in Moving Developers Away from SQL Server to Postgres?

In AWS re-invent, Amazon announced open-sourcing Babelfish for PostgreSQL, a SQL Server-compatible end-point for PostgreSQL to make PostgreSQL fluent in understanding communication from apps written for SQL Server. Let us discuss what is this technology and whether if it's gonna really move developers away from Microsoft SQL Server to Postgres
Resources
aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensour...
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:30 Postgres vs SQLServer
5:20 What is Babelfish?
9:40 Why Babelfish May not Work
10:06 Will Babelfish Includes everything?
11:46 BabelFish is an Extra Layer
13:35 What REALLY is Babelfish?
15:00 Performance
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[@samiridwy132]

Cool that we're seeing more uploads recently!

[@TheCardil]

Enterprise DB, the company that offers paid Postgres, has such translation layer for Oracle for years now. Not many companies use that.

[@Christobanistan]

If the data is still small, you can do this: I moved from MSSQL to PostgreSQL utilizing Entity Framework, using these steps: 1. Had an existing Entity Framework dbcontext for MSSQL. 2. Created an identical EF dbcontext pointing to the new PostgreSQL db and using the EF nuget for Postgresql. I also used the nuget that changes the SQL naming conventions on the new dbcontext to snake_case since Postgresql uses that by convention. 3. Loaded the old dbcontext with all the records from the existing db. 4. Copied all to the new dbcontext. 5. Saved the new. 6. Long wait 7. If data is small enough, won't time out and your are done. IF data is too large, there is probably a way to increase timeout. EF automatically looks at all the relationships and generates SQL that copies stuff in the right order to not violate RI.

[@autohmae]

3:36 make it easier to move workloads between clouds... in theory, but inertia also exists when moving between clouds just as... with databases. 7:24 solutions for both have existed in the past: SQL-server protocol proxy and SQL-server automatic query translation. 11:12 yes, PostgreSQL supports Windows Domain Authentication (Microsoft's flavor of Kerberos). What is more fun: a Linux machine can actually be part of ('join') multiple domains at the same time unlike a WIndows machine. 15:42 this is why the blogpost mentioned: focus on correctness. 17:30 I think it's about legacy proprietary applications. Let's say the community of this project is reporting success with running Sharepoint on this. And you have an old Sharepoint environment you want to keep around with legacy data. You aren't interested in using Sharepoint, just making sure you have access to the data. But you don't want to keep paying for & running SQL Server. Sharepoint has a very fixed/known set of queries. If enough people spent the time to make sure all these queries run well enough for it to be correctly translated than you could do so. You don't care about performance, just access to legacy data. I'm pretty certain if this works well enough, then Microsoft will change it's licensing model to fit the new reality. 18:18 my guess is: it will just be a proxy running on the same machine as PostgreSQL itself. Or an extra process part of PostgreSQL which opens up a SQL-server port. Because PostgreSQL is very extendible you can create an extension which starts a new process. Directly from the documentation: "PostgreSQL can be extended to run user-supplied code in separate processes. Such processes are started, stopped and monitored by postgres, which permits them to have a lifetime closely linked to the server's status. These processes have the option to attach to PostgreSQL's shared memory area and to connect to databases internally; they can also run multiple transactions serially, just like a regular client-connected server process. Also, by linking to libpq they can connect to the server and behave like a regular client application."

[@hnasr]

Your point about legacy systems is very compelling auto, if I don't care about the performance and I just want the old system to keep running for free instead of paying SQLserver, Babelfish helps for sure.. thanks as always.

[@autohmae]

@@hnasr yeah, but as mentioned, I'm certain if they get it to really work well MS will just change the game with new licensing model. :-/ Will be very interesting see if Amazon can kick start a really community.

[@spatialtech]

Old quote from Bruce Mackenzie (MELP 1996 or 7) 'Data tends to stick where it lands'

[@jonscott4775]

Another great video - Thanks! I wonder if it will run like pgbouncer-rr which is another AWS initiated open source product. My guess is that this will appeal to accountants and designers, and the nightmare of the bugs and challenges will be down in the detail and only developers will be really aware of the issues :)

[@joshuachambers8146]

I'm seeing more and more postgresql deployments lately. So yes for me!

[@fbifido2]

do they have any Oracle 8/9/10 Database to PostgreSQL Database, without any programming ???

[@sariksiddiqui6059]

I dont think you would not want to change library. You would. If postgres offer more,you need libraries that offer more

[@vinny142]

7:50 "There is a money datatype in both servers" But PostgreSQL lets you define your own custom types with custom behavior so I guess they've created lots of those to guarantee the behavior. And no this is not going to do much against MS-SQL, the only thing worse than running MS-SQL is running an emulation of MS-SQL. One reason why companies run MS-SQL is the commercial support; they want a phonenumber they can call when extrement hits the fan and how are you going to get commercial support not just on PostgreSQL but on this entire emulation business? The only good I see for this is to show just how flexible and capable PostgreSQL is. If anything it's a showcase for the poer of PostgreSQL.

[@A5tr0101]

I don't think it will succeed, sounds like Postgres Converter, i would never want to build a backend that has added processing cost on just processing queries... i'll be sticking with Microsoft SQL Server

[@ashokexp]

Enterprises will start caching the fishes 😂 but fish will remains living happily forever

[@valour.se47]

You might not want to vendor lock; your DATA toooo

[@willi1978]

People are lazy. Moving a database even if Amazon says it works the same requires work also to make sure it really works the same. Some managers might see it as a way to reduce cost and therefore I believe that a low percentage might move (if the price is significantly cheaper).

[@vt96]

We need more information before we jump the gun and form an opinion

[@willinton06]

No, the simple answer is no, don’t you dare touch my mssql