Re: Vertica targeting PostgreSQL users - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy
| From | Chris Travers |
|---|---|
| Subject | Re: Vertica targeting PostgreSQL users |
| Date | |
| Msg-id | CAKt_ZfskEaOqAE3pVoAm98VizxJhz5+oS3onciBq39EaX0kSJw@mail.gmail.com Whole thread Raw |
| In response to | Vertica targeting PostgreSQL users ("Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org>) |
| Responses |
OT: (for jd@cmdprompt) Re: Vertica targeting PostgreSQL users
|
| List | pgsql-advocacy |
On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz@postgresql.org> wrote:
Hi,Vertica current marketing is heavily targeting Postgres users:and features this directly from their homepage. I also know of at least one campaign that has gone out around this.The good news for our community is that because of all the advances in Postgres and the overall growth to our user base, there are database companies looking to win users over to their platforms. This is also a good learning experience for us too: because we have so many users, we also have to look at user retention to ensure that we have enough features and available knowledge to manage Postgres. I have not read the case study that they proposed, but knowing the group of people who work on Postgres and our software ecosystem, we may have been able to retain those databases on Postgres.
To my mind I am not that concerned about who moves away to PostgreSQL. People migrate for various reasons. Some of those are technical. Some of them are political. In the end whether a given user migrates is not, really, in our control. I don't think focusing on "why did we lose these" is helpful. What is helpful instead is understanding how to do the same sorts of things on PostgreSQL as Vertica.
Going forward, we must continue to understand our users’ needs while ensuring that we can provide them as many resources as possible to help them manage Postgres and show them that here is great help available when it is required.
There are other important topics here in analytics workloads. Up until this year most of my experience, for example, was in workflows which were mixed buy oriented primarily towards OLTP engines. So things like ERP, scientific data processing and the like. Now I have stepped into analytics and am working in a very large environment. The big differences in terms of how you handle sparse matrices and other sorts of things crop up. Systems like Cassandra and Vertica solve some analytics problems but they don't solve all problems extremely well. They have their own caveats and learning curves. At least as far as our experience at Adjust we have typically solved these problems ourselves.
The arguments about the development direction of PostgreSQL in my view is similarly problematic. Companies contribute what their users need. And that's good. But almost all the literature published about PostgreSQL focuses on OLTP problems and solutions. What we are actually missing is a series of good solid papers, discussions, and so forth regarding how to do OLAP on PostgreSQL effectively. This is an area where PostgreSQL is rapidly growing but without guidance, people aren't going to know how to think about, model, and approach a lot of these problems.
So I am going to suggest a different approach, namely that we see what we can do to create space and exposure for stuff discussing OLAP etc. on PostgreSQL. Maybe a special category of case studies and maybe contributed white papers or the like. But this is an area where a lot of knowledge sharing could be very helpful.
Best,Jonathan
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
pgsql-advocacy by date: