Four and a half years after Oracle Corp. completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL continues to cast a formidable shadow over the web database market despite losing much of its original open-source character under Oracle’s new ownership. But to say that the buyout has not been felt in the ecosystem would be an understatement.

A growing number of users, including prominent tech firms such as Google and Red Hat, Inc., have already moved or are in the process of moving their data from MySQL to community-led alternatives that aren’t controlled by any one vendor. While Oracle has committed to maintaining an open source version of MySQL, the user community has had his doubts about the company’s sincerity. This has put wind in the sails of historic underdog PostgreSQL, which is now finally hitting its stride but still lacks many of the capabilities needed to fulfill its potential to plug the hole left in the wake of the Sun acquisition.

EnterpriseDB Corp., a top distributor of the open-source platform, is trying to change that, one new feature and performance improvement at a time. The latest batch of enhancements announced by the company mark another  big step in the right direction.

The most notable addition is a new Foreign Data Wrapper, or FDW, for Hadoop that allows users to pull in data from their analytic clusters utilizing familiar SQL syntax without going through the trouble of cobbling together a connector from scratch. The extension levels the playing field in this area against Oracle, which added support for the batch processing framework to MySQL last April. It also lowers the technical barriers that have made managing databases a painful task  in the past.

The new Hadoop connector, set to hit general availability in fall, is joined by  a revamped wrapper for MongoDB. Both take advantage of the FDW upgrade introduced with the 9.3 release of PostgreSQL, which EnterpriseDB says speeds response times and helps keep code maintainable through the use of a formal client library specification.

The extensions were unveiled in conjunction with a pair of new tools that the company is releasing to the community in a bid to smooth out some of the trickier aspects of managing PostgreSQL environments. The first of the free utilities – pg_catcheck – is a diagnostics engine that scans the metadata used to keep track of database objects for errors and inefficiencies. The other solution – pg_hiberantor – helps maintain consistent performance after a failure  by automatically restoring the data held in cache at the time of the shutdown.

EnterpriseDB is also updating two of its premium products to further simplify life for administrators. Replication Server 5.1 reduces latency, provides more room to scale across clusters, makes it easier to search rows and allows users to define custom policies for how to handle data conflicts, according to the firm. EDB Failover Manager 1,1, meanwhile, adds an advanced authentication capability and comes with new agents that run as operating system services so to stay available even when the database itself goes down.

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