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Today EnterpriseDB announced the release of Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3R2.  This is a significant step for EDB’s product strategy.  8.3R2 creates meaningful distance between Advanced Server and the other products in EDB’s database line-up – Postgres Plus Standard Server and PostgreSQL community database.   If you just want free database software with community support, go with PostgreSQL; if you want a hardened, tested distro of the the current community build, go with Standard Server; if you want a commercial-grade Postgres product with deep Oracle compatibility and other high-end features, go with Advanced Server.

In addition to bug fixes and incremental enhancements, 8.3R2 includes two significant feature upgrades:

• Infinite Cache. This feature provides massive scalability for database apps that can benefit from a high-end caching engine. Hint: think social networking and popular blogging sites, where there’s a significant amount of user-generated data that needs to remain highly available to the application. There are a couple of cool aspects of the Infinite Cache implementation. First, it’s built from the ground up to take advantage of commodity cache servers, so scaling won’t cost an arm and a leg. Second, although EDB has extensively leveraged the popular memcached engine, Infinite Cache isolates memcached from the application tier. That’s actually a bigger deal than it sounds. Need more caching capacity? Pop in a couple of blades, restart the database and badda-bing, everything runs faster.
  
• Deeper Oracle Compatibility. EDB began making its bones as an Oracle compatibility player more than four years ago. The company is now the unequivocal leader in that space. Postgres Plus 8.3R2 contains a lot of the depth you’d expect to find in a 5th generation implementation. None of the new features sound glitzy or sexy, they sound like the hardcode things customers ask for when they’re doing serious work with your product. It’s nice to see that EDB is continuing to invest in this area, especially considering all the “advice” the company has gotten over the years about abandoning its Oracle strategy.