Thread: 775,000 downloads plus

Folks,

Thought you'd be interested to know that there have been 775,000 downloads
(approximately) of PostgreSQL 8.0 since release from our main FTP mirrors
and Bittorrent.

Note that this does *not* include any of the following ways to get
PostgreSQL:  BSD Ports, Linux Distributions, Mac packages, SourceForge,
pgFoundry, Pervasive, Mammoth, Bizgres, PowerGres, or several of the
localized web sites, and bundled in other software and hardware like
Hyperic, GForge, OpenACS, and varios network appliances.  So I think it's
reasonable to assume that that only represents about 1/2 of our total
installs to date, making them about 1.5 million.

Now, some of that will be upgrades, possibly a lot.  Of the 775,000, the
most downloads of a particular version (8.0.3) was 260,000.

Regardless of how you cut the numbers, though, that means we have a *lot*
more users than we thought.   I think our official number of worldwide
users should be escalated to:  "Between half a million and one million."

Good thing they're not *all* on PGSQL-GENERAL.   ;-)

Predictably, 2/3 of those downloads overall were Windows.   Interstingly,
the plurality of Windows downloads (about 150,000) occurred in April.
What happened in April that would make so many people interested?

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 11:39:31AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Predictably, 2/3 of those downloads overall were Windows.   Interstingly,
> the plurality of Windows downloads (about 150,000) occurred in April.
> What happened in April that would make so many people interested?

Are there any tax preparation packages that use PostgreSQL?  :-)
April is tax time in the US (I don't know about other countries).

Does April's activity look markedly different than other months,
or is it just noise?  Do you see any spikes?  I'm wondering if a
favorable article might have resulted in increased activity.  If
you have web server logs from that period, and if the logs contain
Referer headers, then you might be able to see if that's the case.

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/

Michael,

> Does April's activity look markedly different than other months,
> or is it just noise?  Do you see any spikes?  I'm wondering if a
> favorable article might have resulted in increased activity.  If
> you have web server logs from that period, and if the logs contain
> Referer headers, then you might be able to see if that's the case.

Funny you should mention that.  We're going to be running something of the
sort at the JasperReports booth at OSCON.   I'll dig into it.

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

mike@fuhr.org (Michael Fuhr) writes:
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 11:39:31AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> Predictably, 2/3 of those downloads overall were Windows.   Interstingly,
>> the plurality of Windows downloads (about 150,000) occurred in April.
>> What happened in April that would make so many people interested?
>
> Are there any tax preparation packages that use PostgreSQL?  :-)
> April is tax time in the US (I don't know about other countries).

True in Canada, too; April 30th is "the day" here...

That notion doesn't make much sense, though.  The main "OSS" software
that gets used in tax prep is some of the Apache stuff.  ISTR that
mention of the Apache/Cocoon XML package splashed up the last time I
used a commercial package.  (And my Prolog-based taxprep software
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/prologtaxes/> hasn't yet been
modified to use DBMS storage; maybe next year ;-).)

> Does April's activity look markedly different than other months, or
> is it just noise?  Do you see any spikes?  I'm wondering if a
> favorable article might have resulted in increased activity.  If you
> have web server logs from that period, and if the logs contain
> Referer headers, then you might be able to see if that's the case.

That sounds useful.
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On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 11:39 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Predictably, 2/3 of those downloads overall were Windows.

I think we might infer that people prefer a version that comes with an
Installer. The Windows version is more like a distro than the RPM
versions, since you still need to do so much yourself for those.

I also note that there are 3 PostgreSQL distros with installers...

So there must be something in it.

Best Regards, Simon Riggs

> If PostgreSQL had a native Windoze Installer for the last five
> years, we'd be the "Most Advanced" AND the "Most Popular" open
> source database.  I think that more than two thirds of the
> production instances of PostgreSQL will still be *nix and that two
> thirds (or more) of the downloads will be Microsoftie.  I think lots
> of folks prefer a click-click-finish install if they just want to
> try something out quickly.

It seems to me that one of the routes to "more installs" would be for
there to be similar support in cPanel for PostgreSQL as there is at
present for MySQL(tm).

There's some support; my present hosting provider has some PostgreSQL
icons here and there; alas, it's dysfunctional :-(.  (Possibly a
pg_hba.conf problem; I haven't access, so I can't infer...)

OTOH, I can run initdb, so could build what I need :-).
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