Re: have you seen this? - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Hi!

Josh Berkus wrote:
> First off, I'm glad you posted this.   Our advocacy thinking tends to be
> heavily US-dominated and I've wondered for a while how things are in your
> part of the world.

Well, they are somewhat different.

For example, Russian version of MySQL's manual still sports the famous
comparison with PostgreSQL:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/ru/Compare_PostgreSQL.html

>>As the PostgreSQL advocacy group thinks that PHP programmers are among
>>their *main* target audience, may I humbly suggest answering the
>>questions that are asked instead of the ones that are not?
>
> Well, the first question I would ask *us* is whether or not PHP programmers
> *are* among our main targets for advocacy.   Based on my experience at
> PHPCon, I would say that 80% of PHP coders would be well served by SQLite --
> MySQL is more powerful than they need or want, let alone us.

That 80% of PHP coders do *not* go to conferences and are indeed best
served by SQLite. But I am speaking about the other 20%, and if some of
them switch that'll be extremely good:
* advocacy within the community
* quality web apllications that support PostgreSQL

> Not that I'm writing off the PHP community.  Given PostgreSQL's powerful
> functions, views, and other in-database code, it makes a really dynamic
> pairing with a lightweight scripting language like PHP -- one which I've used
> to great effect.   But I think that the target audience for this message is
> not necessarily existing PHP jockeys, but rather coders in client-side
> languages, and database designers used to Oracle and MSSQL, looking to move
> to the web.

OK, let's replace "PHP developers" by "current MySQL users". My point
being, that most of them already know about features, and some of them
even *want* these features. While there are some real problems
preventing them from switching (lack of Win32 port, for instance), there
also are some imagined ones and the natural aversion to change.

>>The most successful (most quoted) advocacy articles I remember were the
>>once from OpenACS (Why not MySQL?) and sql-info.de (MySQL gotchas). To
>>make people look at PostgreSQL you should concentrate on why MySQL is
>>*bad*, to create a sense of insecurity in its users. That is the
>>propaganda that works.
>
> If you really want to reach the PHP coders where they live, though, just point
> out MySQL's licensing policy.    If they want to use MySQL and *not*
> open-source their entire site, then they have to cough up $300 to $500US to
> MySQL AB as a commercial license, and pay for *each server* they use.
> That's a persuasive reason to switch to PostgreSQL.    You can also point out
> that MySQL AB has changed the MySQL license 3 times since 2.0; what's to keep
> them from closing it entirely, and eliminating the Open Source version, if
> they feel it will be profitable?

Yes, and that is precisely the approach I called "creating a sense of
insecurity". "You can get fired for choosing MySQL", "what happens when
MySQL AB goes bankrupt?", etc. :]

The recent article on licensing problems was noticed *very* well.

I'd like to suggest doing the same things in technical perspective: why
implementing the functionality on client side is *bad*, length of
MySQL's release cycles, creating some "switching" stories, this kind of
stuff.