Re: Need for PostgreSQL demand? - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

At 9:37p -0400 on 02 Nov 2007, Ron Peterson wrote:
> 2007-11-02_21:20:58-0400 Ron Peterson <ron.peterson@yellowbank.com>:
>
>> I don't have numbers to back this up, but my suspicion is that these
>> numbers correlate with the numbers of applications that use each
>> respective database as their primary backend platform.
>
> I think the best possible PostgreSQL marketing would be for someone to
> develop a knock-your-socks-off killer app.  It wouldn't have to be
> something as high-profile as an ERP app either.  Pick off some lower
> hanging fruit first.  There's some pretty crufty stuff out there that
> exists primarily on account of no-one taking the initiative to build
> anything better.  Check out the market for systems to manage the higher
> education enterprise for example - registration systems, etc.

Actually, we* created something like that back in '96-'97.  It
started life with Postgres (5.2, then others), but later got migrated to
Oracle because the college used (uses) Banner.  It has since grown into
what the college uses for it's student course registration and works
very well for us.  It's tacked on a few other features, and has to be
updated from time to time as the underlying datamodel to which it
interfaces in Banner gets changed or updated between versions, but the
core functionality is student course lookup and registration.

What I think would be more helpful for our college (and I imagine plenty
others, but I've no numbers, just numerous conversations) than just a
registration system is a rethinking of the entire one-program-fits-all
that is Banner/PeopleSoft/SIS/... It's perhaps nice in thought to have
everything tied together in one program, but the non-modularization
makes it extremely difficult to understand/use without a lot of support,
not to mention initial training.  If someone/entity could come along
with a much cleaner/more user-friendly (gawd, much more user-friendly!)
system and a migration plan (the trick, I know), well . . . The problem,
as always, is that initially there's no money there, and if it's an
open-source gig, there's the administrative fallacy/notion that "we'd
have no one to blame if something went wrong."  I wouldn't mind working
on something like that, but I'm not in a position to be able to work for
free, nor could I even hope to do it by myself.  I don't think I'm alone
in these respects.

> If someone wants to start "The PostgreSQL Application Company", and can
> promise some measure of job security, that would make me raise an
> eyebrow though... :)

That's the real trick, isn't it?  I'll bet that many of us on this/the
general list would take notice of that.

Kevin

* Little more complicated than that because I wasn't around for the
beginning and was but "one of many" students to work on the project (it
was entirely coded by undergrad students with small tidbits of mentoring
along the way).  If you're interested, I'm happy to talk more off list
about the project, which we call WebDB.