Press Release review comments - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Just reading the Press Release for 8.3
http://cvs.pgfoundry.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/press/pr/releases/8.3/en/release.txt

Few thoughts spring to mind

- Just in time background writer changes are nice, but since we already
mention the load distributed checkpoints (a closely related feature), it
seems we are saying too much at the expense of other features.

- Asynch Commit is a seriously important feature, not necessarily for
existing users but definitely for people used to MySQL's speed and lack
of robustness with myisam tables. It's an important message that we can
get the speed of myisam and at the same time the robustness of Postgres.
I don't suggest that we specifically mention mysql, but it is a feature
that will alter many people's perception of Postgres, so we should talk
about it somewhere.

So I suggest we swap Just-in-time for Async Commit.

(To forestall any negative comment, I would add: Yes, I did write that
code, but I wrote it *because* of its importance to a wide range of
people that might now consider PostgreSQL. No, I'm not asking for my
name in brackets anywhere.)

Lastly, the press contacts listed are all on the North American
continent and within a few hours of each other. I don't think we gain
much by having a 3rd contact from that part of the world. There are
English speaking countries all around the world in almost every
timezone, obviously England, but also South Africa, Australia, New
Zealand and many more. If we mention only North America, it detracts
significantly from the "Global Presence" message we would wish to
convey. That is a point all by itself, I guess.

The total European market size is the roughly the same as the North
American market in terms of people, money etc. South Pacific market is
also large and probably further into open source than some parts of
Europe. It really is high time we got the idea across that open source
and Postgres, in particular, is not solely a US project. I mean no
disrespect at all to any of my fine colleagues, but the geographical
location of the chair in which we sit has very little to do with our
mission, goals, teamwork, communication channels or whatever. The same
isn't true of our external communications, which definitely are affected
by local issues, markets and definitely by timezones.

So I suggest we have a press contact in either England or Australia
listed, instead of one of the three contacts. In time, I hope that we
would see an American, European and Australasian contact on the list, so
we have a much wider distribution of support. Or others.

If other languages want to have global representation that would be good
also, for example Spanish-speaking contacts in the Americas and Europe.
(I haven't checked). I don't see any reason why a country has to speak a
particular language for it to be represented either. For example the
Japanese press release might reasonably wish to have a European contact
also, since many businesses and their leaders speak Japanese, even if
the countries in which they operate do not. The same thinking might
apply to a range of other languages.

--
  Simon Riggs
  2ndQuadrant  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com