Hot Hot Hot

I want to share my excitement with you about an event that just took place in the Postgres community.

A couple of days ago, the Postgres enhancement known as HOT (Heap Only Tuples) was committed into the code base for the next release (v8.3). In a nutshell, HOT significantly increases the performance of Postgres over long periods of time in update-intensive OLTP applications.

“This is a good thing,” you might say, “but what's the big deal?” I’m glad you asked...

HOT is the largest and deepest single change to the Postgres base that has been implemented in the last several years. It impacts many areas of the core database, and is truly something that could be called "rocket science." The reason I'm so pleased about HOT (besides the obvious customer benefit) is that the enhancement was conceived, designed, implemented, and shepherded through the community entirely by the EnterpriseDB team.

The acceptance of HOT into the 8.3 code base means two things: First, it is the flagship example of our commitment to contribute back to the community large quantities of enormous value. It feels great to give back to a community that has given us the basis of our very existence. Second, HOT firmly seats EnterpriseDB as a leader in the community; one of the very few organizations — perhaps the only one — on the planet that is able to deliver Postgres technology of this complexity and size.

It is a particularly great day for the team that did the work. First and foremost, I have to recognize Pavan Deolasee, who was the thought leader on this effort from beginning to end. Of course, many others contributed greatly to the project, including Anupama Aherrao, Korry Douglas, Dharmendra Goyal, Jonah Harris, Hope Jiang, Sivakumar Krishnamurthy, Heikki Linnakangas, Shoaib Mir, Bruce Momjian, Nikhil Sontakke, Greg Stark, Yaser Raja, Umair Shahid, and Peter Yarrow.