The Basics - PostgreSQL: Up and Running - page 15

currently: Node Postgres , Node Postgres Pure (just like Node Postgres but no com‐
pilation required), and Node-DBI .
Where to Get Help
There will come a day when you need additional help. Because that day always arrives
earlier than expected, we want to point you to some resources now rather than later.
Our favorite is the lively mailing list specifically designed for helping new and old users
with technical issues. First, visit PostgreSQL Help Mailing Lists . If you are new to Post‐
greSQL, the best list to start with is PGSQL-General Mailing List . If you run into what
appears to be a bug in PostgreSQL, report it at PostgreSQL Bug Reporting .
Notable PostgreSQL Forks
The MIT/BSD-style licensing of PostgreSQL makes it a great candidate for forking.
Various groups have done exactly that over the years. Some have contributed their
changes back to the original project.
Netezza , a popular database choice for data warehousing, was a PostgreSQL fork at
inception. Similarly, the Amazon Redshift data warehouse is a fork of a fork of Post‐
greSQL. GreenPlum, used for data warehousing and analyzing petabytes of information,
was a spinoff of Bizgres, which focused on Big Data. PostgreSQL Advanced Plus by
EnterpriseDB is a fork of the PostgreSQL codebase that adds Oracle syntax and com‐
patibility features to woo Oracle users. EnterpriseDB ploughs funding and development
support to the PostgreSQL community. For this, we're grateful. Their Postgres Plus
Advanced Server is fairly close to the most recent stable version of PostgreSQL.
All the aforementioned clones are proprietary, closed source forks. tPostgres , Postgres-
XC , and Big SQL are three budding forks with open source licensing that we find in‐
teresting. These forks all garner support and funding from OpenSCG . The latest version
of tPostgres is built on PostgreSQL 9.3 and targets Microsoft SQL Server users. For
instance, with tPostgres, you use the packaged pgtsql language extension to write func‐
tions that use T-SQL. The pgtsql language extension is compatible with PostgreSQL
proper, so you can use it in any PostgreSQL 9.3 installation. Postgres-XC is a cluster
server providing write-scalable, synchronous multimaster replication. What makes
Postgres-XC special is its support for distributed processing and replication. It is now
at version 1.0. Finally, BigSQL is a marriage of the two elephants: PostgreSQL and Ha‐
doop with Hive. BigSQL comes packaged with hadoop_fdw , an FDW for querying and
updating Hadoop data sources.
Another recently announced PostgreSQL open source fork is Postgres-XL (the XL
stands for eXtensible Lattice), which has built-in Massively Parallel Processing (MPP)
capability and data sharding across servers.