> I agree. The support from the Postgres people is outstanding. There
> seems to be a catch though. It was pretty much the same with PHP about 3
> years ago: I story I keep telling is that my very first question on the
> list there was answered in less than 30 minutes by Rasmus Lerdorf, the
> inventor of PHP himself (imagine posting a question to M$ and within 30
> mins, the founder of the company . . . ). He's still very active on the
> list but the sheer volume of postings has reached a limit, due to the
> popularity and success of PHP, where a _lot_ is getting lost and
> unanswered in php-general. I wonder whether this is an inbuilt,
> unavoidable problem with free software projects once they reach a certain
> level of popularity.
It is a problem. A human being just can't answer ten trillion emails a day
and do anything else productive.
I use PHP a lot (with PostgreSQL ) and when I first got into PHP I was on
the PHP mailing lists, they were high volume even a few years ago so I
couldn't imagine what they are now..
The good thing about PostgreSQL is that you don't have many people
installing it to just play around. I foung that probably %80 of the
questions around the PHP mailing lists were from people that didn't have a
clue how to get started and wanted to install and code PHP because they
heard it was neat. I have nothing against that at all, it's a good thing
(sort of ), I just don't think we see that kind of attitude with PostgreSQL
(or any RDBMS really).. Generally I see people using MySQL first (why, I
don't know) and then moving to PostgreSQL for it's much more rich feature
set. In the process there people tend to learn the little stuff with MySQL
like basic SQL syntax and at least a general understanding of what's going
on. In addition to all that the people that are using PostgreSQL (or and
RDBMS) are generally using it for a specific purpose (writing an application
to use it, for instance) and programmers tend to be able to figure a lot out
for themselves.. I think that all the above contributes to the fact that
where there is a substantial amount, it's not to 100+ a day yet :-)
Anyway.. I've been on the list for almost two years now and I have seen an
increase in traffic for sure but I haven't seen a decrease in support.
Support always has and continues to be excellent. I don't think it will
become much of a problem in the near future but only time will tell!
-Mitch
