After 18 months trying to crack the mainstream database market using Postgres, the open source database, embedded database house Pervasive Software is calling it quits.

Pervasive president and CEO John Farr has posted an open letter to PostgreSQL community, saying that the company had "underestimated the high level of quality support and expertise already available within the PostgreSQL community" and that under the circumstances "the opportunity for Pervasive Software to meaningfully increase adoption of PostgreSQL by providing an alternative source for support and service was quite limited."

Farr did not return a call to his office, but his PR person did. She said the company's losses on the flyer were not "material" and that the pothole impeding Pervasive was the Postgres community, not other companies trying to commercialize Postgres.

Pervasive is the outfit that Novell acquired and later spun out as Btrieve Technologies after its NetWare and Windows database manager. It changed its name and went public in 1997 selling Pervasive PSQL, the next-generation Btrieve, which is why you can imagine it was interested in finding another product line. It probably should have stuck closer to home and devices and used a product that was easier to embed. Postgres, by reputation, is not.

Pervasive bundled Postgres up with a bunch of connectivity drivers and management tools for Linux and Windows, aiming the bundle at corporate America expecting them to build applications on top of it. It was certified for use with SUSE. Support ran anywhere from $99 a year to $4,999 and it also meant to sell migration services. It was supposed to undersell the database stalwarts Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

Given the acceptance of Linux, the company was convinced the corporate marketplace was ripe for an open source database and that Postgres was a more feature-rich - and for Pervasive cheaper - wagon to hitch its wagon to than MySQL.

The Pervasive letter says it will support its Postgres customers and donate IP and collateral material from its misadventure to the Postgres community.

Pervasive does about $45 million a year, roughly the same as MySQL, earning less than $8 million. Revenues have been dropping.

A previous venture into application servers called Tango also came undone and cost the company about $30 million. The company is expecting to upgrade its proprietary database by the end of the year.

(This story was published originally in Client Server News.)