Salesforce Nabs Open Source Database Guru for War on Oracle

The grudge match between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his former protege Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has reached legendary proportions in recent years. Salesforce has now added more fuel to the fire, hiring Tom Lane, a core contributor to PostgreSQL, an open source database that provides an alternative to Oracle software.
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The grudge match between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his former protege Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has reached legendary proportions in recent years. Ellison and Benioff pepper their speeches and interviews with not so subtle digs at each other's companies, and Oracle even went so far as to cancel Benioff's scheduled keynote at the Oracle Open World conference in 2011.

The irony is that beneath all the bickering, Salesforce is a major customer of Oracle. Its web-based services are built on top of Ellison's database software. That's why Benioff was scheduled to speak at the Oracle conference in the first place.

But Salesforce may be trying to ease its dependence on Oracle. The rumor mill has long indicated that this is the case, and Salesforce has now added more fuel to the fire, hiring Tom Lane, a core contributor to PostgreSQL, an open source database that provides an alternative to Oracle software.

PostgreSQL -- or Postgres for short -- is a relational database much like the primary Oracle database or the open source MySQL. It was first released in 1995, but has been gathering steam in recent years, thanks to its flexibility and its ability to scale across many machines. Lane has been a core contributor to the project for 15 years, most recently as an employee at Red Hat.

"I'll still be spending 75%+ of my time on community Postgres work (about what I was doing at Red Hat)," Lane said in an e-mail. "For the rest, Salesforce is interested in expanding their use of Postgres, and I'll be advising the team that is working on that. I'm not supposed to say too much about details, but they have some very interesting database problems to solve, so I'm looking forward to it."

Last October, Salesforce posted a job listing seeking 40 to 50 Postgres database engineers for a "huge project." This doesn't necessary mean Salesforce was looking to hire that many heads, but Lane's e-mail confirms that the company is working with Postgres on some level.

It's possible that the job listings were related to Salesforce's platform cloud offering Heroku, which already offers a hosted Postgres service. But Lane says that he's joining the Salesforce "mothership," not Heroku.

In any event, a wholesale switch from Oracle to Postgres would be a massive and risky undertaking. Any downtime or loss of data resulting from a migration would reflect on Salesforce. But a slow, long-term switch is not out of the question.

Salesforce did not announce Lane's arrival at the company. The news arrived quietly, on the planning page for a Postgres conference, which listed Salesforce as Lane's employer.

"His role for many years, in addition to hacking on the most important core bits, was to defend quality and a 'policy of least surprise' when implementing new features," Postgres contributor Selena Deckelmann wrote in a blog post about Lane. "Development for this community is done primarily on a mailing list. Tom responds to so many contributor discussions that he’s been the top overall poster on those mailing lists since 2000, with over 85k messages."