Thread: Some PG stats in SD Times article

Folks,

I found this part of this article interesting:

http://sdtimes.com/news/105/story15.htm

"Top Deployed Databases. When respondents were asked which databases were in
use at their company, the lion's share went to Microsoft, with 78 percent
saying that SQL Server was deployed. It was followed closely by Oracle, at 55
percent, and surprisingly by MySQL, at 33 percent. Next were IBM's DB2, at 22
percent; Sybase, at 15 percent; and PostgreSQL, at 8 percent. Readers were
presented with a field of 14 major databases for this question.

 Database for Current Project. The same list of databases was used for a
related question, which asked which specific database was used on the
respondent's current or most recent project. The top rankings were similar,
with Microsoft at the top with SQL Server, at 57 percent; followed by Oracle,
at 39 percent; MySQL, at 16 percent; and DB2, at 11 percent. PostgreSQL, at 5
percent, however, edged out Sybase, at 4 percent, for the fifth position."

So among SD Times 1,000 subscribers, we're the 4th or 5th most popular
database, and between 5% and 8% of the market.   This is a useful stat to
throw at people.   5-8% of the market may not seem like much, but it's better
than Apple is doing in the PC market, and means potentially tens of thousands
of production installations.

--
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco

On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 15:19, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I found this part of this article interesting:
>
> http://sdtimes.com/news/105/story15.htm
>
<snip stats>
> So among SD Times 1,000 subscribers, we're the 4th or 5th most popular
> database, and between 5% and 8% of the market.   This is a useful stat to
> throw at people.   5-8% of the market may not seem like much, but it's better
> than Apple is doing in the PC market, and means potentially tens of thousands
> of production installations.
>

And in current projects were actually beating out a commercial vendor,
so that is a positive sign. I thought the last part was equally telling
as well:

"Reasons for Choosing Specific Databases. BZ Research asked respondents
to identify the top factors, from a list of 25, that led to the choice
of the database being used for their current or most recent project. The
top factor, by a wide margin, was familiarity with the database,
indicated by 58 percent of respondents. This was followed by the
reputation of the database vendor, at 34 percent; lowest development
costs, at 30 percent; lowest deployment costs, at 30 percent; and high
availability/reliability features of the database, at 24 percent."

ISTM that postgresql's strengths lie in almost an exact opposite order
of the reasons people picked databases for deployment. That certainly is
one reason why it seems like such an uphill battle in expanding
postgresql adoption. The upside is of course that if we can expand the
"familiarity" piece we could see a large uptake by new users, and
probably nothing will help us with that goal more than the upcoming
win32 port :-)

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL