Thread: Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Global Development Group Announces
> -----Original Message----- > From: Marc G. Fournier [mailto:scrappy@hub.org] > Sent: 03 December 2002 19:12 > To: Bruce Momjian > Cc: PostgreSQL-development > Subject: Re: [HACKERS] [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Global > Development Group Announces > > > On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > > Wow, this sounds great. > > > > Where can I get a copy? Why would anyone use anything else? ;-) > > Well, if you read the announcement in its entirety, you would have > noticed: > > "Source for this release is available at: > http://advocacy.postgresql.org/download/ > I could have sworn we used to have a bunch of ftp mirrors for downloads. Come to think of it I rewrote/stole a load of Vince's PHP code to allow you to select one from the portal recently. Are we not using them anymore? :-) Regards, Dave.
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Dave Page wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Marc G. Fournier [mailto:scrappy@hub.org] > > Sent: 03 December 2002 19:12 > > To: Bruce Momjian > > Cc: PostgreSQL-development > > Subject: Re: [HACKERS] [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Global > > Development Group Announces > > > > > > On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > > > > Wow, this sounds great. > > > > > > Where can I get a copy? Why would anyone use anything else? ;-) > > > > Well, if you read the announcement in its entirety, you would have > > noticed: > > > > "Source for this release is available at: > > http://advocacy.postgresql.org/download/ > > > > I could have sworn we used to have a bunch of ftp mirrors for downloads. > Come to think of it I rewrote/stole a load of Vince's PHP code to allow > you to select one from the portal recently. Are we not using them > anymore? Haven't you been paying attention? There's this new advocacy and suit marketing thing going on that makes all of that irrelevant. It's just there for show now. :) Vince. -- http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it'sjust radio.
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Dave Page wrote: > I could have sworn we used to have a bunch of ftp mirrors for downloads. > Come to think of it I rewrote/stole a load of Vince's PHP code to allow > you to select one from the portal recently. Are we not using them > anymore? Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* We are looking at some improvements to the download stuff ... Greg(?) suggested a layout that I really liked for a web based version that would have to tie into the main mirror database ... one that provided a wee bit more information then just the directory listings ... but, with that thought, isn't there a file you can put into an ftp directory that, when you web into that directory, i gives you the listings with various comments, or is that just using the .messages file?
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > Haven't you been paying attention? There's this new advocacy and suit > marketing thing going on that makes all of that irrelevant. It's just > there for show now.
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Dave Page wrote: > > > I could have sworn we used to have a bunch of ftp mirrors for downloads. > > Come to think of it I rewrote/stole a load of Vince's PHP code to allow > > you to select one from the portal recently. Are we not using them > > anymore? > > Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself > had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on > it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* I understood it was intentional so comments wouldn't have done any good. > We are looking at some improvements to the download stuff ... Greg(?) > suggested a layout that I really liked for a web based version that would > have to tie into the main mirror database ... one that provided a wee bit > more information then just the directory listings ... but, with that > thought, isn't there a file you can put into an ftp directory that, when > you web into that directory, i gives you the listings with various > comments, or is that just using the .messages file? All of them I've seen had an index.html in it. Vince. -- http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it'sjust radio.
Dave Page wrote: <snip> > I could have sworn we used to have a bunch of ftp mirrors for downloads. > Come to think of it I rewrote/stole a load of Vince's PHP code to allow > you to select one from the portal recently. Are we not using them > anymore? Of course we are, it's just that we're also trying to direct people to the Advocacy site where there is a lot more info, in a lot more languages. The only reason for the download page not having a list of mirrors is due to not having done it yet. :-) Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift > :-) > > Regards, Dave. > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to majordomo@postgresql.org -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
Marc G. Fournier writes: > Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself > had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on > it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* And how should we have guessed that release management is now done by the "advocacy" group? While you're out advocating, don't forget the existing users. -- Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net
Justin Clift writes: > Of course we are, it's just that we're also trying to direct people to > the Advocacy site where there is a lot more info, in a lot more languages. Why don't we just shut down the regular web site. Clearly it's not considered adequate anymore. -- Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net
Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Marc G. Fournier writes: > > >>Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself >>had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on >>it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* > > > And how should we have guessed that release management is now done by the > "advocacy" group? While you're out advocating, don't forget the existing > users. Sorry Peter. Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Justin Clift writes: > > >>Of course we are, it's just that we're also trying to direct people to >>the Advocacy site where there is a lot more info, in a lot more languages. > > > Why don't we just shut down the regular web site. Clearly it's not > considered adequate anymore. Well, qe're trying to move the new "portal" side of things into place (presently at wwwdevel.postgresql.org), so that all of the different PostgreSQL pieces are more easily accessible. Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself > > had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on > > it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* > > I understood it was intentional so comments wouldn't have done any good. Anything is only as intentional as nobody making constructive critisms of it ... ewwww, that was major bad english ... not part of solution, you are part of problem sort of thing...
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Marc G. Fournier writes: > > > Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself > > had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on > > it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* > > And how should we have guessed that release management is now done by the > "advocacy" group? While you're out advocating, don't forget the existing > users. It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ...
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > Dave Page wrote: > <snip> > > I could have sworn we used to have a bunch of ftp mirrors for downloads. > > Come to think of it I rewrote/stole a load of Vince's PHP code to allow > > you to select one from the portal recently. Are we not using them > > anymore? > > Of course we are, it's just that we're also trying to direct people to > the Advocacy site where there is a lot more info, in a lot more languages. > > The only reason for the download page not having a list of mirrors is > due to not having done it yet. So as to not recreate the wheel, or, at least, get the wheel properly rolling, can we get that download page redirected to the one that does list the mirrors? :) I liked Greg(?)'s ideas, but I don't see it as being implemented overnight :)
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Justin Clift writes: > > > Of course we are, it's just that we're also trying to direct people to > > the Advocacy site where there is a lot more info, in a lot more languages. > > Why don't we just shut down the regular web site. Clearly it's not > considered adequate anymore. As of yet, the new portal isn't ready yet ... and the adequacy of the existing site isn't so much a problem, but maintainability of it ... according to Vince, trying to add anything to it is virtually impossible :(
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > > Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself > > > had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on > > > it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* > > > > I understood it was intentional so comments wouldn't have done any good. > > Anything is only as intentional as nobody making constructive critisms of > it ... ewwww, that was major bad english ... not part of solution, you are > part of problem sort of thing... That may be how you understood it, but not how I understood it. There appears to be an incremental takeover occurring. Vince. -- http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it'sjust radio.
Marc G. Fournier wrote: <snip> > So as to not recreate the wheel, or, at least, get the wheel properly > rolling, can we get that download page redirected to the one that does > list the mirrors? :) Yep. Would the best way to do this be changing the wording to say something like: "PostgreSQL can be downloaded as source code from any of the many mirror sites:" With a link after it directing to somewhere that gives the list. The present "www.postgresql.org" with the list of mirrors would probably be adequate, but it'll need to be a different url than the straight "www.postgresql.org" as that's going to change as soon as the new portal is in place. Does this sound like a workable approach for now? Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift > I liked Greg(?)'s ideas, but I don't see it as being implemented overnight > :) > > -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Peter Eisentraut wrote: > > > Marc G. Fournier writes: > > > > > Yup, as with doing anything for the firs ttime, the press release itself > > > had its 'bugs' ... considering how many times Josh asked for comments on > > > it, I'm surprised that nobody picked up on it *shrug* > > > > And how should we have guessed that release management is now done by the > > "advocacy" group? While you're out advocating, don't forget the existing > > users. > > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... That wasn't stronger, it was fluffier. It was full of buzzwords that were masking the actual content. Are you trying to hide the accomplishments or promote them? If you're trying to hide them like in this announcement you may want to try using this tool: http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html The stored phrases are much more refined and better paired. Vince. -- http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it'sjust radio.
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Peter Eisentraut wrote: > > > Justin Clift writes: > > > > > Of course we are, it's just that we're also trying to direct people to > > > the Advocacy site where there is a lot more info, in a lot more languages. > > > > Why don't we just shut down the regular web site. Clearly it's not > > considered adequate anymore. > > As of yet, the new portal isn't ready yet ... and the adequacy of the > existing site isn't so much a problem, but maintainability of it ... > according to Vince, trying to add anything to it is virtually impossible > :( I have a new design for it, now it's just getting the time to implement it. It's easy to add to and looks alot nicer. Vince. -- http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it'sjust radio.
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > That wasn't stronger, it was fluffier. It was full of buzzwords that > were masking the actual content. Are you trying to hide the > accomplishments or promote them? If you're trying to hide them like in > this announcement you may want to try using this tool: > http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html The stored phrases are much more > refined and better paired. Bookmark'd for the next release ... thanks for the suggestion ...
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > I have a new design for it, now it's just getting the time to implement > it. It's easy to add to and looks alot nicer. Cool, I think the only beef I ever had with it was the way the results were presented, but loved teh whole annotated aspects ...
Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > That wasn't stronger, it was fluffier. It was full of buzzwords that > > were masking the actual content. Are you trying to hide the > > accomplishments or promote them? If you're trying to hide them like in > > this announcement you may want to try using this tool: > > http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html The stored phrases are much more > > refined and better paired. > > Bookmark'd for the next release ... thanks for the suggestion ... I was hoping for something that would take existing text and *Bullshit* it. Bummer. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania19073
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > Marc G. Fournier wrote: > > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > > > That wasn't stronger, it was fluffier. It was full of buzzwords that > > > were masking the actual content. Are you trying to hide the > > > accomplishments or promote them? If you're trying to hide them like in > > > this announcement you may want to try using this tool: > > > http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html The stored phrases are much more > > > refined and better paired. > > > > Bookmark'd for the next release ... thanks for the suggestion ... > > I was hoping for something that would take existing text and *Bullshit* > it. Bummer. Click on it a few times. You'll get the text you need. I've actually used it for real things with excellent results (I'm not going to elaborate). Vince. -- http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it'sjust radio.
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > Marc G. Fournier wrote: > > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > > > That wasn't stronger, it was fluffier. It was full of buzzwords that > > > were masking the actual content. Are you trying to hide the > > > accomplishments or promote them? If you're trying to hide them like in > > > this announcement you may want to try using this tool: > > > http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html The stored phrases are much more > > > refined and better paired. > > > > Bookmark'd for the next release ... thanks for the suggestion ... > > I was hoping for something that would take existing text and *Bullshit* > it. Bummer. No, but I figure that at least it will give me a good site to give me BS fodder from ... man, just wait for the next release announcement :)
Marc G. Fournier writes: > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. -- Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net
Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Marc G. Fournier writes: > > > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... > > Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the > development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The > last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. Peter, I understand your perspective, but I think you are in the minority on this one. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania19073
> > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... > > Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the > development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The > last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. Ummm...I disagree. Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. Particularly when you compare against similar efforts from MySQL, Oracle, etc. Chris
> > > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with > a > > > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... > > > > Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the > > development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The > > last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. > > Ummm...I disagree. Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. > Particularly when you compare against similar efforts from MySQL, Oracle, > etc. Yes, indeed. The _prime_ reason for the fact that MySQL is the "M" in "LAMP" is that there is a steady, intent set of efforts going into marketing the "M." People think that MySQL is faster, easier to use and "more standard" than its alternatives, and that is certainly the result of marketing. The /real/ technical merit of MySQL has been that there are some integrated tools for ISPs like CPANEL that make it easy for ISPs that don't know /anything/ about DBMSes to provide MySQL for their customers. CPANEL doesn't support PostgreSQL, and historically, it has been somewhat more difficult to support large numbers of PostgreSQL instances on a web server. Some of that has changed, though CPANEL /still/ doesn't support PostgreSQL. If any of you consider these "technical" issues to be small and petty, I'm afraid I don't /care/. More importantly, the hundreds of ISPs licensing CPANEL don't care. /They/ are the ones that would need convincing, and I don't think there's any real route to convince them that they should be pounding down CPANEL's door asking for a PostgreSQL front end and to convince them that they have to tell their customers: "We sold you MySQL, telling you it was good for you to use. We were wrong, and our new story is that you should convertyour databases over to use PostgreSQL." Anyone consider that a likely scenario? Anyone? It's fair to say that PostgreSQL doesn't need the likes of the "Database HOWTO" that gives a sales job that's so blindly enthusiastic as to be, well, blind. But an organization that has /no/ "marketing department" is at a severe disadvantage, like it or not. It is unfortunate that it is almost impossible to have a marketing group without there being some wilful blinders involved; it's vital for there to be some technical involvement in the marketing group to pop whatever bubbles they grow that are woefully wrong. But even if it operates with some occasional lack of /real/ vision, it's necessary to have a marketing group... -- (reverse (concatenate 'string "moc.enworbbc@" "sirhc")) http://cbbrowne.com/info/advocacy.html Rules of the Evil Overlord #106. "If my supreme command center comes under attack, I will immediately flee to safety in my prepared escape pod and direct the defenses from there. I will not wait until the troops break into my inner sanctum to attempt this." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>
At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: >Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. What are the consequences of the problem? >Particularly when you compare against similar efforts from MySQL, Oracle, >etc. You could even include Microsoft here - they do a lot of database marketing. I am not at all sure the fact that a lot of large companies with dubious products engage in extensive marketing is a reason for *us* to engage in extensive marketing. We already have a substantial following, and our clients have direct access to the developers, so any marketing group is pretty irrelevant for existing clients. So the only place I can see for a marketing group is in building our market share by bringing in new clients. If that is what we want, then fine. But I don't want to see any part of the development effort distorted or the existing user base inconvenienced in an effort to purely gain that market share. I usually associate increased marketing with decreased quality, and I think the causality works *both* ways. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Philip Warner | __---_____ Albatross Consulting Pty. Ltd. |----/ - \ (A.B.N. 75 008 659 498) | /(@) ______---_ Tel: (+61) 0500 83 82 81 | _________ \ Fax: (+61) 03 5330 3172 | ___________ | Http://www.rhyme.com.au | / \| | --________-- PGP key available upon request, | / and from pgp5.ai.mit.edu:11371 |/
[cc: list trimmed] On Wednesday 04 December 2002 22:52, Philip Warner wrote: > At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: > >Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. > What are the consequences of the problem? Actually, lack of easy upgrading is one of PostgreSQL's major problems.... But lack of focused marketing -- truthful, not, as has been said, like the 'Database HOWTO' -- is a real problem. It would be nice to increase our usage. > If that is what we want, then fine. But I don't want to see any part of the > development effort distorted or the existing user base inconvenienced in an > effort to purely gain that market share. I usually associate increased > marketing with decreased quality, and I think the causality works *both* > ways. ISTM there's a separate, non-code-developer group doing this. It doesn't seem to take away _any_ developer resources to do an advocacy site. However, I seriously question the need in the long term for our sites to be as fractured as they are. Good grief! We've got advocacy.postgresql.org, techdocs.postgresql.org, odbc.postgresql.org, gborg.postgresql.org, developer.postgresql.org, jdbc.postgresql.org, etc. Oh, and we also have www.postgresql.org on the side? I think not. Oh, and they are fractured in their styles -- really, guys, we need a unified style here. -- Lamar Owen WGCR Internet Radio 1 Peter 4:11
On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 22:54:37 -0500, Philip Warner wrote: > At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: >>Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. > > What are the consequences of the problem? > One consequence that probably hits home for everyone here is it makes it extremely hard to make a living working with postgresql. A quick search on monster.com gives me 17 jobs mentioning postgresql, with none listed in the last week. A search on mysql gives me 100 jobs, with 3 filed just today. I won't even go into the numbers for Oracle, DB2, and M$. We all have to pay the bills and I think we'd like to do it working with postgresql. >>Particularly when you compare against similar efforts from MySQL, >>Oracle, etc. > > You could even include Microsoft here - they do a lot of database > marketing. I am not at all sure the fact that a lot of large companies > with dubious products engage in extensive marketing is a reason for *us* > to engage in extensive marketing. > You can't win marketshare on technology alone, so unless you think we don't need to increase our market share, that is reason enough to do more marketing. > We already have a substantial following, and our clients have direct > access to the developers, so any marketing group is pretty irrelevant > for existing clients. So the only place I can see for a marketing group > is in building our market share by bringing in new clients. > Well, my previous employer uses postgresql, but they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2. Technically there was no reason to switch, but if your choice is switch databases or go out of business, there really isn't much choice. In the company I work for now we use at least 4 different database systems. We could probably switch all of these to postgresql, but it probably be one heck of a battle to convince people of that. A simple argument that could be raised is that several of the database developers use ERWin from computer associates. ERWin's postgresql support is spotty compared to its support of oracle, and unless there is a groundswell of demand for better postgresql support, that's not going to change. If postgresql can gain a larger market share, computer associates might improve their postgresql support, and we, existing clients that we are, will be able to use postgresql in more areas. Marketing is very relevant to existing customers. > If that is what we want, then fine. But I don't want to see any part of > the development effort distorted or the existing user base > inconvenienced in an effort to purely gain that market share. I usually > associate increased marketing with decreased quality, and I think the > causality works *both* ways. > Aren't most development efforts made simply to gain market share? After all, I don't think we added schema support to get *less* people to use postgresql. Robert Treat
Robert Treat wrote: > On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 22:54:37 -0500, Philip Warner wrote: > > At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: > >>Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. > > > > What are the consequences of the problem? > > > > One consequence that probably hits home for everyone here is it makes it > extremely hard to make a living working with postgresql. A quick search on > monster.com gives me 17 jobs mentioning postgresql, with none listed in the > last week. A search on mysql gives me 100 jobs, with 3 filed just today. > I won't even go into the numbers for Oracle, DB2, and M$. We all have to > pay the bills and I think we'd like to do it working with postgresql. One other thing marketing does is attracting developers, including _paid_ developers, to work on PostgreSQL. Fortunately PostgreSQL is a big hit in Japan, so SRA can pay me to work on PostgreSQL. If we can increase PostgreSQL's popularity, we will get more people working to improve PostgreSQL, both paid and volunteers. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania19073
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Philip Warner wrote: > What are the consequences of the problem? Speaking from the perspective of a long time postgresql user, who currently has several very mission critical applications using postgresql on the back end, at a very large company... I can say the one consequence of the problem that I have run into personally, is convincing management to allow me to use postgresql for my projects to begin with. Fortunately, where I am currently employed, I was able to bash my head against the brick wall until they got tired of hearing from me, and allowed me to go with postgresql instead of sybase (which was their first choice, as the corporation already has a sybase site license). The lack of name recognition was a factor that contributed to the difficulty of getting postgresql accepted. The last thing a non technical middle manager wants to tell his or her manager is that some mission critical application that just crashed was running on some database he had never heard of before that he gave the go ahead to use. Anyway, this probably doesn't belong on this mailing list, but I saw the question and figured I'd answer :) By the way, I'm happy to report that after a year of absolutely flawless performance ( except the day the raid array imploded, which was hardly postgres's fault ), postgresql has a very good reputation in my department. Brian Knox Systems Programmer
Lamar Owen wrote: > However, I seriously question the need in the long term for our sites to be as > fractured as they are. Good grief! We've got advocacy.postgresql.org, > techdocs.postgresql.org, odbc.postgresql.org, gborg.postgresql.org, > developer.postgresql.org, jdbc.postgresql.org, etc. Oh, and we also have > www.postgresql.org on the side? I think not. Oh, and they are fractured in > their styles -- really, guys, we need a unified style here. I'd love to see this happen. From reading the messages here, it sounds like the perception is that marketing == spouting bullshit. I don't believe that's true. I think having an informative, up-to-date, stylistically consistent website would do a tremendous amount of good. The JDBC one is a particularly bad example right now - it doesn't fit in with any of the rest of the site and its most prominent link is to a completely out-of-date list of compliance tests the driver fails. The driver may have its flaws but it's a lot better than presented there. IMHO these things make a difference to technical people as well as suits. If that site and the MySQL JDBC driver's site were my first impressions, I would be using MySQL. The JDBC site is certainly not the only one with flaws. The main website has this paragraph in <http://www15.us.postgresql.org/related.html>: For encrypted postgresql connections, Brett McCormick (brett-public@speakeasy.org) has made a patch for PostgreSQL version 6.3.2 using SSL. Visit his info page for more information. That's horribly obselete. In fact, I think a lot of the related projects are. That's only two clicks away from the main page. I'm volunteering to do work here. I could at the very least go through the sites and make a longer list of things like this that I notice. If they are public CVS somewhere, I can send patches. I saw that there's a <http://wwwdevel.postgresql.org/>. What's going on with that? Is there anything I can do to speed up its adoption? How will it affect the rest of the sites? Is this list the appropriate place to discuss the websites? or should I take it to -advocacy? My impression here is that the two sites are maintained separately and the people involved haven't interacted very much. Is that accurate or no? Thanks, Scott
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002 cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com wrote: > It is unfortunate that it is almost impossible to have a marketing group > without there being some wilful blinders involved; it's vital for there to be > some technical involvement in the marketing group to pop whatever bubbles they > grow that are woefully wrong. But even if it operates with some occasional > lack of /real/ vision, it's necessary to have a marketing group... And, for the most part, those that are -advocacy are techies that wish to contribute as they can, but don't have the knowledge/time to dedicate to actual code ... Bruce is kinda quiet, but both he and I are on that list, and I read (and imagine Bruce does to) pretty much everything that goes through ... but, again, these aren't 'marketing droids' we have over there, but techies that are using the software and have an idea of her limitations and benefits ...
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Philip Warner wrote: > At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: > >Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. > > What are the consequences of the problem? Well, I'd have to say the major one is a difficult in increasing our user base, as ppl like MySQL are making sure they are heard whenever they add something new that we've had for years ... > If that is what we want, then fine. But I don't want to see any part of > the development effort distorted or the existing user base > inconvenienced in an effort to purely gain that market share. I usually > associate increased marketing with decreased quality, and I think the > causality works *both* ways. That is what we want, and the efforts in no way are meant to undermine/distort anything ... go to archives.postgresql.org and read through the threads to get a feel ... its not a closed/hidden list by any means ...
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Lamar Owen wrote: > However, I seriously question the need in the long term for our sites to be as > fractured as they are. Good grief! We've got advocacy.postgresql.org, > techdocs.postgresql.org, odbc.postgresql.org, gborg.postgresql.org, > developer.postgresql.org, jdbc.postgresql.org, etc. Oh, and we also have > www.postgresql.org on the side? I think not. Oh, and they are fractured in > their styles -- really, guys, we need a unified style here. Ummm, actually, we have: advocacy, techdocs, gborg, developer, archives, jobs note that altho they are seperate URLs, the end result is going to be that http://www.postgresql.org we become the "town square" of sorts, which should be "real soon now" ... jdbc/odbc are 'project sites' off of gborg, similar to what sourceforge provides ...
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Scott Lamb wrote: > Is this list the appropriate place to discuss the websites? or should I > take it to -advocacy? My impression here is that the two sites are > maintained separately and the people involved haven't interacted very > much. Is that accurate or no? Expect some major changes coming down the pipe ... http://www.postgresql.org is in its final stages of a major face lift ... the informatoin that iscurrently on that site, Vince is in the process of doing a major face lift on, but as it is now, I guess its been a veritible nightmare for him to really add anyting to it ... Once we announce the new http://www.postgresql.org (hopefully this coming week *cross fingers*), then start bombarding us with problems :) Note that for the web site development effort itself, there is a closed list with about a dozen or so of us on it ... the -advocacy list is meant to be open, with its focus reflected on the advocacy web site itself ...
On Thursday 05 December 2002 09:37, Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Lamar Owen wrote: > > However, I seriously question the need in the long term for our sites to > > be as fractured as they are. Good grief! We've got > note that altho they are seperate URLs, the end result is going to be that > http://www.postgresql.org we become the "town square" of sorts, which > should be "real soon now" ... > jdbc/odbc are 'project sites' off of gborg, similar to what sourceforge > provides ... Glad to hear this. One question: is there any particular reason the www list is closed? Just curious -- reading archives of this list, or getting a digest or this list, even in a read-only manner, might alleviate some misconceptions. Those who care can at least read what's planned for the web site. As far as advocacy is concerned, I made a conscious decision to not read that list -- I don't need to be convinced to use PostgreSQL. :-). Nor am I necessarily a good 'advocacy' person......my 'convincing' many times comes across much different from what I meant. So I don't read that list. Can you (or Vince) distill a roadmap for the website and post here, on hackers? -- Lamar Owen WGCR Internet Radio 1 Peter 4:11
Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002 cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com wrote: > > > It is unfortunate that it is almost impossible to have a marketing group > > without there being some wilful blinders involved; it's vital for there to be > > some technical involvement in the marketing group to pop whatever bubbles they > > grow that are woefully wrong. But even if it operates with some occasional > > lack of /real/ vision, it's necessary to have a marketing group... > > And, for the most part, those that are -advocacy are techies that wish to > contribute as they can, but don't have the knowledge/time to dedicate to > actual code ... > > Bruce is kinda quiet, but both he and I are on that list, and I read (and > imagine Bruce does to) pretty much everything that goes through ... > but, again, these aren't 'marketing droids' we have over there, but > techies that are using the software and have an idea of her limitations > and benefits ... Yes, I have been way too quiet. I am trying to carve out time before starting on 7.4 work, but it seems stuff keeps coming up. I have updated the developers page with company names, and Vince is going to integrate that. My next step is to split out my advocacy mailbox and start shooting out content for the advocacy site. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania19073
Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> Marc G. Fournier writes:
>>> It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a
>>> stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ...
>>
>> Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the
>> development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The
>> last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix.
> Peter, I understand your perspective, but I think you are in the
> minority on this one.
I tend to agree with Peter. Not that we don't need a marketing
presence; we do (I think Great Bridge's marketing efforts are sorely
missed). But the point he is making is that the pgsql mailing lists
go to people who are generally unimpressed by marketing fluff. And
they're already "sold" on PG anyway.
The right way to handle this next time is to generate a PR-style
press release to send to outside contacts, but to do our more
traditional, technically-oriented announcement on the mailing lists.
regards, tom lane
At 12:12 AM 5/12/2002 -0500, Robert Treat wrote: > > > > What are the consequences of the problem? > > > >One consequence that probably hits home for everyone here is it makes it >extremely hard to make a living working with postgresql. ... >You can't win marketshare on technology alone I am happy with increasing market share so long a development is not distorted or current users inconvenienced. We have seen the latter with the misplaced announcements. And the former because I am writing this on -hackers, rather than implementing dependency-tracking in pg_dump ;-). >...lots of stuff deleted... >Marketing is very relevant to existing customers. Good point. Market Share -> Influence ->Corprate Support -> more features -> market share. Gaining market share *is* a natural consequence of improving the product; marketing is about convincing people a product has improved, even if it hasn't. Advocacy is about telling people about the product as it is - and I have no problem with that, with the above proviso. >Aren't most development efforts made simply to gain market share? <diatribe> I seriously hope not - in fact I would find that very depressing. In my opinion, anyone who devotes their personal free time to an open source development project probably has a slew of complex motivations that have little to do with market share. Perhaps the closest they would come would be to say "I want to make it better", and in some peoples minds, "better" is measured by market share. In my case, development I did on other open source projects (libgd) was driven by a philosophical objection to application of patents to software in the US, and to a need for particular features (gd2 format, & gif support). My work on PG is driven by a desire to make the product more useful (to me), more usable (for me), and by a philosophical belief in the importance of free & open software. The fact that other people (& I) profit from this work is great. In any case, market share, for me, is at best a third order influence - and I assume that's true for most people who contribute to OS software. Although I do admit that there is a natural tendency to want "your team" to win. </diatribe> >After >all, I don't think we added schema support to get *less* people to use >postgresql. I am not sure why it was added, and it's sufficiently esoteric and large that I doubt market share was an issue. If we wanted market share, then online-vacuum and online-upgrade would have been the big-hitters. My guess is that it was done because we did not support it, it is in the SQL standard, and it solved a number of issues that caused existing users & developers problems. It was probably also an interesting project. Maybe I'm wrong... ---------------------------------------------------------------- Philip Warner | __---_____ Albatross Consulting Pty. Ltd. |----/ - \ (A.B.N. 75 008 659 498) | /(@) ______---_ Tel: (+61) 0500 83 82 81 | _________ \ Fax: (+61) 03 5330 3172 | ___________ | Http://www.rhyme.com.au | / \| | --________-- PGP key available upon request, | / and from pgp5.ai.mit.edu:11371 |/
On Thu, 05 Dec 2002 21:26:13 -0500, Philip Warner wrote: > At 12:12 AM 5/12/2002 -0500, Robert Treat wrote: > I am happy with increasing market share so long a development is not > distorted or current users inconvenienced. We have seen the latter with > the misplaced announcements. It seems to me that people were inconvenienced solely because Mark forgot to CC the right groups and he didn't put the word "7.3" in the right place in his subject line. Oh, and guess it was disruptive for people who killfile any piece of email that has quoted text in it... > And the former because I am writing this on > -hackers, rather than implementing dependency-tracking in pg_dump ;-). > so get back to coding already... >>...lots of stuff deleted... >>Marketing is very relevant to existing customers. > > Good point. Market Share -> Influence ->Corprate Support -> more > features -> market share. > > Gaining market share *is* a natural consequence of improving the > product; really? postgresql has been improving by leaps and bounds of the last few years, but I guarantee you it's been losing market share, and it's losing that market share to databases without half the features. > marketing is about convincing people a product has improved, > even if it hasn't. Advocacy is about telling people about the product as > it is - and I have no problem with that, with the above proviso. > <snip lots more stuff that basically says marketing isn't all bad, it's irrelevant too> well, i think any more discussion at this point becomes a semantical argument or a flame war, and I've time for neither. Robert Treat
As someone who exists mainly as an active user (and part-time advocate/documentation tweaker), I have found the release of PostgreSQL 7.3 to be disappointing. The ensuing pseudo-flamewar on the various lists has been similarly disappointing. I was surprised, for instance, to receive a non-list email announcing the release of the software but then to have to wait for days actually to see it show up on the official (or even the advocacy) website in a news item. Even now it is not listed at PostgreSQL, Inc. Consider the pieces of the puzzle here: 1) an official website (http://www.postgresql.org/) 2) an advocacy website (http://advocacy.postgresql.org/) 3) official mailing lists 4) a separate email database 5) a developers' website (http://developers.postgresql.org/) 6) an official ftp site (ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/) 7) mirror websites 8) mirror ftp sites 9) a corporate website (http://www.pgsql.com/) While I have remained impressed with the software itself, the organization of these pieces has left much to be desired for the duration of my involvement as an end user. As someone who works in a small startup company, I am a frequent witness to both the advantages and disadvantages of the lack of a strong benevolent dictatorship in the form of management. I think one of the core problems with the advocacy and presentation of the PostgreSQL project is the fact that it has been a developer-centric project for quite some time, and that process, while there are drivers, does not tend to affect much other than the code. There does not seem to be a single, driving vision (or even a Board or consensus-based vision) behind the public face of PostgreSQL. Granted, when a project is entirely volunteer-based, the management and development are loose. I've noticed that in many such projects, web design and maintenance become very low priority, especially when left to groups of hackers. Witness GNU, Debian, and, I would say PostgreSQL: extremely spare official websites often intimidating and/or difficult for the newbie. I've wanted to see a bit more structure given to the PostgreSQL website, the release process, and various other portions of the project for quite some time, but often it seems as though such a structure would not even be welcome. As someone who has not had time to be a true developer on the project, I'm content to wait for the missing features I'd like to see. Still, I'm hoping that developers and advocates alike realize that the release process and these lists are in the public domain, and the way business is conducted affects the perceptions of users as much as the quality of the software or any amount of marketing. In any case, thanks for all the hard work. I actually thought the text of the email release I received was good and am working on the upgrade process now in my own environment. -tfo In article <29852.1039115828@sss.pgh.pa.us>,tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) wrote: > Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes: > > Peter Eisentraut wrote: > >> Marc G. Fournier writes: > >>> It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > >>> stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... > >> > >> Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the > >> development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The > >> last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. > > > Peter, I understand your perspective, but I think you are in the > > minority on this one. > > I tend to agree with Peter. Not that we don't need a marketing > presence; we do (I think Great Bridge's marketing efforts are sorely > missed). But the point he is making is that the pgsql mailing lists > go to people who are generally unimpressed by marketing fluff. And > they're already "sold" on PG anyway. > > The right way to handle this next time is to generate a PR-style > press release to send to outside contacts, but to do our more > traditional, technically-oriented announcement on the mailing lists.
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > Peter Eisentraut wrote: > > Marc G. Fournier writes: > > > > > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > > > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... > > > > Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the > > development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The > > last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. > > Peter, I understand your perspective, but I think you are in the > minority on this one. Kinda depends who you're asking now, doesn't it? I happen to agree with him, but as long as you're only going to involve a selected few in the opinion gathering you can pretty much get the answer you want to get. I can survey 100 people and get the opposite result putting you in the minority. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Robert Treat wrote: > Well, my previous employer uses postgresql, but they were under constant > assault from their clients to use oracle or db2. Technically there was no > reason to switch, but if your choice is switch databases or go out of > business, there really isn't much choice. That tells me their clients wanted a commercial database, not one that's open source. All the marketing in the world won't change that. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
Vince Vielhaber wrote: > On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Robert Treat wrote: > > >>Well, my previous employer uses postgresql, but they were under constant >>assault from their clients to use oracle or db2. Technically there was no >>reason to switch, but if your choice is switch databases or go out of >>business, there really isn't much choice. > > > That tells me their clients wanted a commercial database, not one that's > open source. All the marketing in the world won't change that. Really? Why do you say that? :-) Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift > Vince. -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Brian Knox wrote: > Speaking from the perspective of a long time postgresql user, who > currently has several very mission critical applications using postgresql > on the back end, at a very large company... > > I can say the one consequence of the problem that I have run into > personally, is convincing management to allow me to use postgresql for my > projects to begin with. Fortunately, where I am currently employed, I was > able to bash my head against the brick wall until they got tired of > hearing from me, and allowed me to go with postgresql instead of sybase > (which was their first choice, as the corporation already has a sybase > site license). > > The lack of name recognition was a factor that contributed to the > difficulty of getting postgresql accepted. The last thing a non technical > middle manager wants to tell his or her manager is that some mission > critical application that just crashed was running on some database he had > never heard of before that he gave the go ahead to use. Not name recognition, but it'd be nice to think that's the reason. Mysql has alot of name recognition but you didn't mention them. You mentioned sybase and having a sybase site license. Marketing wouldn't help here, they want a commercial database used that they've already paid for. What too many people fail to realize is that in a commercial environment many companies want another company to point the finger at in case of disaster. Sybase failed, or HP failed, or IBM failed, or Microsoft failed. They feel they can do something about that. If they lose a few million they have someone they can go after, who are they going to go after if PostgreSQL fails them? Marc? Bruce? Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
> What too many people fail to realize is that in a commercial environment > many companies want another company to point the finger at in case of > disaster. Sybase failed, or HP failed, or IBM failed, or Microsoft > failed. They feel they can do something about that. If they lose a > few million they have someone they can go after, who are they going to > go after if PostgreSQL fails them? Marc? Bruce? This is when you start to shout that RedHat offers commercial support, licencing, etc. INCLUDING a free, non-restrictive source licence to the core components of RHDB. -- Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca> PGP Key: http://www.rbt.ca/rbtpub.asc
On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Robert Treat wrote: > > > > > >>Well, my previous employer uses postgresql, but they were under constant > >>assault from their clients to use oracle or db2. Technically there was no > >>reason to switch, but if your choice is switch databases or go out of > >>business, there really isn't much choice. > > > > > > That tells me their clients wanted a commercial database, not one that's > > open source. All the marketing in the world won't change that. > > Really? > > Why do you say that? Because of this taken from the above quoted text: "they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. Anything else you don't understand about that? Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
On 7 Dec 2002, Rod Taylor wrote: > > > What too many people fail to realize is that in a commercial environment > > many companies want another company to point the finger at in case of > > disaster. Sybase failed, or HP failed, or IBM failed, or Microsoft > > failed. They feel they can do something about that. If they lose a > > few million they have someone they can go after, who are they going to > > go after if PostgreSQL fails them? Marc? Bruce? > > This is when you start to shout that RedHat offers commercial support, > licencing, etc. INCLUDING a free, non-restrictive source licence to the > core components of RHDB. I had considered mentioning redhat but didn't want to blur things. Red hat markets PostgreSQL under a different name and they're offering a complete package (including support as you note). The PGDG isn't doing that and they shouldn't be. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
Vince Vielhaber wrote: > Because of this taken from the above quoted text: > > "they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" > > Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just > happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. And.... ? Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift > Anything else you don't understand about that? > > Vince. -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 20:52, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > Why do you say that? > > Because of this taken from the above quoted text: > > "they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" > > Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just > happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. This is a reason to increase marketing effort. I know the word has pejorative overtones in our community, but it means talking about PostgreSQL so that the PHBs hear about it and therefore begin to feel comfortable about using it. If something is familiar, it feels safe. We need to make PostgreSQL familiar. That's why we need marketing. -- Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> LFIX Limited
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > Because of this taken from the above quoted text: > > > > "they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" > > > > Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just > > happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. > > And.... ? And what? If you can't understand the above you're in the wrong business. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
Vince Vielhaber wrote: > On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > > >>Vince Vielhaber wrote: >> >>>Because of this taken from the above quoted text: >>> >>>"they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" >>> >>>Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just >>>happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. >> >>And.... ? > > > And what? If you can't understand the above you're in the wrong business. And.... ? Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift > Vince. -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
On 8 Dec 2002, Oliver Elphick wrote: > On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 20:52, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > Why do you say that? > > > > Because of this taken from the above quoted text: > > > > "they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" > > > > Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just > > happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. > > This is a reason to increase marketing effort. I know the word has > pejorative overtones in our community, but it means talking about > PostgreSQL so that the PHBs hear about it and therefore begin to feel > comfortable about using it. > > If something is familiar, it feels safe. We need to make PostgreSQL > familiar. That's why we need marketing. Then why wasn't mysql in the list? It's familiar. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > > > > > >>Vince Vielhaber wrote: > >> > >>>Because of this taken from the above quoted text: > >>> > >>>"they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" > >>> > >>>Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just > >>>happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. > >> > >>And.... ? > > > > > > And what? If you can't understand the above you're in the wrong business. > > And.... ? That's what I thought. You have no argument so your just typing. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 22:27, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > On 8 Dec 2002, Oliver Elphick wrote: > > If something is familiar, it feels safe. We need to make PostgreSQL > > familiar. That's why we need marketing. > > Then why wasn't mysql in the list? It's familiar. To PHBs? MySQL doesn't have anything like the marketing clout of Oracle and IBM. Be thankful it isn't in the list; it would make it a hell of a lot more difficult to dislodge it. If we want people to use PostgreSQL in preference to anything else, we have to make it known. That is marketing. If we believe we have a good product we need to say so and say why and how it's better, cheaper and purer than anything else. If there's no good marketing, bad marketing will rule the world for sure. If we don't care, we can retreat into a pure technological huddle and disappear up our own navels. The rest of the world won't even notice. Such purity will eventually destroy the project because it will lose the momentum for growth through a lack of new input. You can grow or you can decline; a steady state is almost impossible to achieve. -- Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk Isle of Wight, UK http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver GPG: 1024D/3E1D0C1C: CA12 09E0 E8D5 8870 5839 932A 614D 4C34 3E1D 0C1C ======================================== "For I am the LORD your God; ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, andye shall be holy; for I am holy." Leviticus 11:44
On 8 Dec 2002, Oliver Elphick wrote: > On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 22:27, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > On 8 Dec 2002, Oliver Elphick wrote: > > > > If something is familiar, it feels safe. We need to make PostgreSQL > > > familiar. That's why we need marketing. > > > > Then why wasn't mysql in the list? It's familiar. > > To PHBs? I would argue yes. Everywhere you turn you see "Powered by MySQL". If years of working on it isn't getting them the familiarity to overcome the PHBs then the PHBs are either not considering open source or the marketing attempts aren't strong or capable enough to penetrate. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
Vince Vielhaber wrote:> > That's what I thought. You have no argument so your just typing. Hi Vince, Was more hoping you'd care to share your basis for stating Robert's employers clients wanted a "commercial database", after he mentioned specifically DB2 and Oracle. Knowing one of the obvious common factors they have and then stating it was definitely the reason - not having sought clarification nor confirmation from Robert - and then further stating that the PG Advocacy and Marketing group wouldn't be able to assist even if that were the case, is extremely bad form coming from anyone, let alone you. Please consider the statements you make by a more accurate approach in the future. Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift > Vince. -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > > That's what I thought. You have no argument so your just typing. > > Hi Vince, > > Was more hoping you'd care to share your basis for stating Robert's > employers clients wanted a "commercial database", after he mentioned > specifically DB2 and Oracle. Knowing one of the obvious common factors > they have and then stating it was definitely the reason - not having > sought clarification nor confirmation from Robert - and then further > stating that the PG Advocacy and Marketing group wouldn't be able to > assist even if that were the case, is extremely bad form coming from > anyone, let alone you. Then they come with the insults. Justin, I'm finished discussing this with you. You're obviously not capable of understanding it and you're simply wasting my time - like usual. Vince. -- Fast, inexpensive internet service 56k and beyond! http://www.pop4.net/ http://www.meanstreamradio.com http://www.unknown-artists.com Internet radio: It's not file sharing, it's just radio.
Oliver Elphick wrote: > If we want people to use PostgreSQL in preference to anything else, we > have to make it known. That is marketing. If we believe we have a good > product we need to say so and say why and how it's better, cheaper and > purer than anything else. If there's no good marketing, bad marketing > will rule the world for sure. > > If we don't care, we can retreat into a pure technological huddle and > disappear up our own navels. The rest of the world won't even notice. > Such purity will eventually destroy the project because it will lose the > momentum for growth through a lack of new input. You can grow or you > can decline; a steady state is almost impossible to achieve. Couldn't agree more with that last point. I've had the perspective of working in big companies using various database software, a company specifically focused on PostgreSQL(Great Bridge), and now a new ISV with PostgreSQL underneath a vertical application (OpenMFG). I can tell youthat even though the pgsql-hacker community is as strong as it's ever been, I think there's a serious danger of the largerworld passing PostgreSQL by. Oracle and DB2 continue to get better and - significantly - cheaper, and SQL Server ... well, Oracle and DB2 are gettingbetter. MySQL, even though it's an inferior product for most real database work, has always had a significantly largerinstalled base than PostgreSQL- and it's less controversial for people like Sun (who have deep relationships with Oracle)to get involved with. And despite the productizing of RHDB, Red Hat doesn't seem interested in making a real pushfor PostgreSQL either. While there are a number of smaller companies trying to help out, I think it's clear that theburden for helping PostgreSQL to find wider acceptance in the marketplace will be on the pgsql-hacker community for sometime to come. I applaud the efforts of the advocacy group, and encourage others here not to look at the marketing as somehow dirty or beneaththe dignity of the project. Keep up the good work, Ned
On Sunday 08 December 2002 06:14 pm, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > On 8 Dec 2002, Oliver Elphick wrote: > > On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 22:27, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > On 8 Dec 2002, Oliver Elphick wrote: > > > > If something is familiar, it feels safe. We need to make PostgreSQL > > > > familiar. That's why we need marketing. > > > > > > Then why wasn't mysql in the list? It's familiar. > > > > To PHBs? > > I would argue yes. Everywhere you turn you see "Powered by MySQL". > If years of working on it isn't getting them the familiarity to overcome > the PHBs then the PHBs are either not considering open source or the > marketing attempts aren't strong or capable enough to penetrate. > I don't think mysql has penetrated the "enterprise class/ mission critical" mindest, which is the level our service had to be provided that. To be honest, it was tough to argue PostgreSQL belonged in that group, though we had a good 2 years worth of history in actually running the business on PostgreSQL which couldn't be dismissed. Of course, some of these companies weren't too happy things were running on linux, and not aix or solaris; are we seeing a pointy haired trend here? Personally I never understood why our sales guys didn't just tell them "ok we'll port the service to oracle/solaris for you, but it's going to cost you at least twice what it does now, if not three times. Oh, and you won't see any better performance." Robert Treat
Am Donnerstag, 5. Dezember 2002 05:22 schrieb Lamar Owen: > [cc: list trimmed] > > On Wednesday 04 December 2002 22:52, Philip Warner wrote: > > At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: > > >Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems. > > > > What are the consequences of the problem? > > Actually, lack of easy upgrading is one of PostgreSQL's major problems.... > > But lack of focused marketing -- truthful, not, as has been said, like the > 'Database HOWTO' -- is a real problem. It would be nice to increase our > usage. > > > If that is what we want, then fine. But I don't want to see any part of > > the development effort distorted or the existing user base inconvenienced > > in an effort to purely gain that market share. I usually associate > > increased marketing with decreased quality, and I think the causality > > works *both* ways. > > ISTM there's a separate, non-code-developer group doing this. It doesn't > seem to take away _any_ developer resources to do an advocacy site. > > However, I seriously question the need in the long term for our sites to be > as fractured as they are. Good grief! We've got advocacy.postgresql.org, > techdocs.postgresql.org, odbc.postgresql.org, gborg.postgresql.org, > developer.postgresql.org, jdbc.postgresql.org, etc. Oh, and we also have > www.postgresql.org on the side? I think not. Oh, and they are fractured > in their styles -- really, guys, we need a unified style here. Hi, there are lots of sites talking about postgresql. But if someone hear about postgresql he sure tries www.postgresql.org. There he just get a list of mirrors. Not really a good start. But worse: there is no links to gborg, advocacy, techdocs, ... Advocacy should be found at www.postgresql.org and have links to the other pages. I found gborg when reading the mailinglistst. It is something like a insidertip. www.apache.org has a much better structure. You go to www.apache.org and get a welcome-message and links to subprojects as the webserver. Another point that comes to my mind is design. I'm not a designer, but I like the design of www.postgresql.org but not advocacy.postrgresql.org. Tommi -- Dr. Eckhardt + Partner GmbH http://www.epgmbh.de
Hi Tommi, Tommi Maekitalo wrote: <snip> > Hi, > > there are lots of sites talking about postgresql. But if someone hear about > postgresql he sure tries www.postgresql.org. There he just get a list of > mirrors. Not really a good start. But worse: there is no links to gborg, > advocacy, techdocs, ... Advocacy should be found at www.postgresql.org and > have links to the other pages. I found gborg when reading the mailinglistst. > It is something like a insidertip. There is a new front page for the www.postgresql.org site that was recently finished, and will be moved into the correct place soon. You can view it for now at wwwdevel.postgresql.org. The new front page has links to the other main websites, so it should help people find the information they need in a much easier way. :-) Hope that's helpful to know. :-) Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift <snip> > Tommi > -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
Vince Vielhaber wrote: > On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Justin Clift wrote: > > > Vince Vielhaber wrote: > > > On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Robert Treat wrote: > > > > > > > > >>Well, my previous employer uses postgresql, but they were under constant > > >>assault from their clients to use oracle or db2. Technically there was no > > >>reason to switch, but if your choice is switch databases or go out of > > >>business, there really isn't much choice. > > > > > > > > > That tells me their clients wanted a commercial database, not one that's > > > open source. All the marketing in the world won't change that. > > > > Really? > > > > Why do you say that? > > Because of this taken from the above quoted text: > > "they were under constant assault from their clients to use oracle or db2" > > Last I looked neither Oracle or DB2 were open source, but they both just > happen to be commercial and I don't see mysql mentioned. > > Anything else you don't understand about that? There are a number of reasons their clients could have been clamoring for DB2 or Oracle, only some of which are related to the fact that they're commercial, closed-source databases: 1. They already have significant in-house expertise with one or the other product. 2. They need 24x7 support, and are convinced that they'll get better support for Oracle or DB2 than anything else. 3. They want a company to blame in case things go wrong. 4. They require certain capabilities that they believe only DB2 or Oracle can provide. 5. They have an established partnership with IBM or Oracle. 6. Some combination of the above. Some of those reasons are such that it might be possible (depending on the specifics of the situation) to successfully market PostgreSQL (or even MySQL) to them, and some of them aren't. It just depends. And that's why it's a bad idea to simply discard that situation as one in which it would be impossible to market PostgreSQL. Marketing is the art of convincing someone that they want your product. Since the keyword here is "want", it's an art that combines reason and emotion. Even if the situation seems logically hopeless (that is, there's no logical reason for the customer to prefer your product over another), you may still manage to successfully market your product to them by appealing to their emotions. Happens all the time. My personal feeling is that in the case of PostgreSQL, it should be marketed primarily using reason. More precisely, it should *not* be marketed to someone for whom a different product would better suit them. That, to me, would be shady at best and would eventually become a blemish on the reputation of the PostgreSQL community. But it doesn't mean giving up just because the client thinks he wants a commercial database: he may well want something else that a commercial database just happens to provide. If you're trying to sell someone on PostgreSQL, it behooves you to figure out what their real needs are first. Their actual needs may be significantly different from what they tell you they want. -- Kevin Brown kevin@sysexperts.com
On 9 Dec 2002 at 1:20, Kevin Brown wrote: > 2. They need 24x7 support, and are convinced that they'll get better > support for Oracle or DB2 than anything else. I have experienced what oracle support means for 24x7. I wouldn't even wish that penalty for my worst enemy. I can tell a story about it but I digress. Details aren't important though true. What really matters is how kindly and dearly you stand by your product. That is where all support originates.. Rest is marketing.. ByeShridhar -- I have never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer toany question. -- Spock, "This Side of Paradise", stardate 3417.3
On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Tom Lane wrote: > I tend to agree with Peter. Not that we don't need a marketing > presence; we do (I think Great Bridge's marketing efforts are sorely > missed). But the point he is making is that the pgsql mailing lists go > to people who are generally unimpressed by marketing fluff. And they're > already "sold" on PG anyway. > > The right way to handle this next time is to generate a PR-style > press release to send to outside contacts, but to do our more > traditional, technically-oriented announcement on the mailing lists. Agreed ... we tried to do 'two-in-one' on this one and it didn't quite work out as well as it could have ... next time, we'll go with both methods ...
On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Thomas O'Connell wrote: > I was surprised, for instance, to receive a non-list email announcing > the release of the software but then to have to wait for days actually > to see it show up on the official (or even the advocacy) website in a > news item. Even now it is not listed at PostgreSQL, Inc. ack, an oversight, I can assure you ... I have proded the apporpriate ppl for this one :(
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > > Peter Eisentraut wrote: > > > Marc G. Fournier writes: > > > > > > > It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a > > > > stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... > > > > > > Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the > > > development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The > > > last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. > > > > Peter, I understand your perspective, but I think you are in the > > minority on this one. > > Kinda depends who you're asking now, doesn't it? I happen to agree with > him, but as long as you're only going to involve a selected few in the > opinion gathering you can pretty much get the answer you want to get. I > can survey 100 people and get the opposite result putting you in the > minority. Me, I think Peter went to the 'far left', while the press release went to the 'far right' (or vice versa) ... i think Tom sum'd it up best that we should have had one for each 'market' we were trying to address ... definitely something to keep in mind and strive for for the next release ...
> > >>>Peter Eisentraut wrote: >>> >>> >>>>Marc G. Fournier writes: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>>It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a >>>>>stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... >>>>> >>>>> >>>>Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the >>>>development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The >>>>last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. >>>> Then you will have what you want. You will be used by a limited number of developers who understand the idea. And you will have ugly dialogues like that. This sounds a bit like 'what would happen if all population of the world were male'. Or all were developers. You should accept the fact that you never have developers on the front line. Even if you take Microsoft - I even do not know the name of the chief software engineer (do not tell me this is Mr. Gates, he is not - there is a guy with a beard, the third richest man in the world or so). Or if you take Oracle - you have Larry. Larry is not a developer. Or even with MySQL - you see the marketing machine. Even with Linux - I have not seen Linus in the press for ages. Or Alan. All 'gurus' are hidden. You take the hype - the hype of Bill or the hype of Linus. Or the charming and successfully arogant Lary. And make a product out of it and a market. As long as the developers of PostgreSQL want to be on the front line - it will be what it is - a fine database used by the people who have the clue to talk to and understand developers. An uncut diamond. I actually do not understand why is the whole cry - why not somebody who has REALLY the marketing in his/her heart - does not make an open source amazingly beautiful and powerful web site. You do not have to ask Bruce for that. You get BRICOLAGE - it is free, and it is good - salon.com runs on it. You inspire some great designer to do the desing (do not ask a developer to do that, otherwise a designer might want to do some code and PostgreSQL is lost). Call Mario Garcia (www.mariogarcia.com) - he will be proud to help. And you take ten fanatic advocacy people to fill in success stories and case studies. News. Whatever. It does not take that much. It take strong individuals that lead. However, some people on HACKERS find special pleasure to kill all initiative. I do not see this for first time... Iavor www.pgaccess.org
Iavor Raytchev wrote: > I actually do not understand why is the whole cry - why not somebody who > has REALLY the marketing in his/her heart - does not make an open source > amazingly beautiful and powerful web site. You do not have to ask Bruce > for that. You get BRICOLAGE - it is free, and it is good - salon.com > runs on it. You inspire some great designer to do the desing (do not ask > a developer to do that, otherwise a designer might want to do some code > and PostgreSQL is lost). Call Mario Garcia (www.mariogarcia.com) - he > will be proud to help. And you take ten fanatic advocacy people to fill > in success stories and case studies. News. Whatever. > > It does not take that much. It take strong individuals that lead. > However, some people on HACKERS find special pleasure to kill all > initiative. I do not see this for first time... I think we have gotten over that hurdle and _most_ agree marketing is a priority. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania19073
Bruce Momjian wrote: >Iavor Raytchev wrote: > > >>I actually do not understand why is the whole cry - why not somebody who >>has REALLY the marketing in his/her heart - does not make an open source >>amazingly beautiful and powerful web site. You do not have to ask Bruce >>for that. You get BRICOLAGE - it is free, and it is good - salon.com >>runs on it. You inspire some great designer to do the desing (do not ask >>a developer to do that, otherwise a designer might want to do some code >>and PostgreSQL is lost). Call Mario Garcia (www.mariogarcia.com) - he >>will be proud to help. And you take ten fanatic advocacy people to fill >>in success stories and case studies. News. Whatever. >> >>It does not take that much. It take strong individuals that lead. >>However, some people on HACKERS find special pleasure to kill all >>initiative. I do not see this for first time... >> >> > >I think we have gotten over that hurdle and _most_ agree marketing is a >priority. > I am sorry. Seems I came too late. I did it out of my good feelings. Iavor
Peter Eisentraut wrote: >Marc G. Fournier writes: > > > >>It isn't, but those working on -advocacy were asked to help come up with a >>stronger release *announcement* then we've had in the past ... >> >> > >Consider that a failed experiment. PostgreSQL is driven by the >development group and, to some extent, by the existing user base. The >last thing we need is a marketing department in that mix. > I am a long term user of PostgreSQL and I think it suffers from a lack of a marketing department. If you have the best restaurant in town, but no one eats there, what's the point? We all correspond and work on PostgreSQL to make it the best we can. To create something "good" that people can use. One of the prime parts of that sentence is "people can use." Like it or not, that means getting the word out. MySQL is an appalling database, but people use it, a lot! Why? Because they really market it. They push it. They craft deceptive benchmarks which show it is better. PostgreSQL doesn't even need to be deceptive. My company is working on a Suite of applications and PostgreSQL is a key component. We will be doing our own local marketing, but it it would help if the PostgreSQL core understood that a clean professional looking website, geared toward end users would make a big difference. Furthermore, I think it would be very rewarding for everyone involved if we could get some of the "street cred" that MySQL has. PostgreSQL *is* a better database in almost every way. If MySQL virtually owns the open source mind share for SQL databases, it is our fault. Peter, Tom, Bruce, et al. you guys do a great job, IMHO PostgreSQL isn't lacking in anything technical, as of 7.2, with non-locking vacuum, I would consider it a viable database with no caveats. 7.3 is superior. A pure Win32 version would be awesome. I just think that if we could get people equally talented at spreading the word and making the noise, it would make a big difference in the number of users. More users eventually translates to more funding or development. Wouldn't you like to say to someone: "I contribute the PostgreSQL project" and have them say "Cool" instead of "What's that?"
Hi, On Sat, 2002-12-14 at 13:26, mlw wrote: > MySQL is an appalling database, but people use it, a lot! Why? Because > they really market it. They push it. They craft deceptive benchmarks > which show it is better. PostgreSQL doesn't even need to be deceptive. > <snip> > Furthermore, I think it would be very rewarding for everyone involved if > we could get some of the "street cred" that MySQL has. PostgreSQL *is* a > better database in almost every way. If MySQL virtually owns the open > source mind share for SQL databases, it is our fault. I do NOT like hearing about MySQL in this (these) list(s). PostgreSQL is not in the same category with MySQL. MySQL is for *dummies*, not database admins. I do not even call it a database. I have never forgotten my data loss 2,5 years ago; when I used MySQL for just 2 months!!! If we want to "sell" PostgreSQL, we should talk about, maybe, Oracle. I have never took care of MySQL said. I just know that I'm running PostgreSQL since 2,5 years and I only stopped it "JUST" before upgrades of PostgreSQL. It's just *working*; which is unfamiliar to MySQL users. I've presented about 28 seminars in last 12 months on PostgreSQL... In all of them, I always tried to avoid talking about MySQL. But always "hit" Oracle. I'm sick of hearing such sentences : "We paid $$$$ to Oracle, we hold 1 GB of data!". Even MySQL can hold that amount of data :-) Also, I have something to say about win32 port. I'm a Linux user. I'm happy that PostgreSQL does not have win32 version. If someone wants to use a real database server, then they should install Linux (or *bsd,etc). This is what Oracle offers,too. Native Windows support will cause some problems; such as some dummy windows users will begin using it. I do not believe that PostgreSQL needs native windowz support. So, hackers (I'm not a hacker) should decide whether PostgreSQL should be used widely in real database apps, or it should be used even by dummy users? I prefer the first one, if we want to compete with Oracle; not MySQL. Best regards, -- Devrim GUNDUZ TR.NET System Support Specialist devrim@tr.net
----- Original Message ----- From: "Devrim GэNDэZ" <devrim@tr.net> To: "PostgreSQL-development" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org> Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2002 4:58 PM Subject: Re: [HACKERS] [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Global Development Group > Also, I have something to say about win32 port. > > I'm a Linux user. I'm happy that PostgreSQL does not have win32 version. > If someone wants to use a real database server, then they should install > Linux (or *bsd,etc). This is what Oracle offers,too. Native Windows > support will cause some problems; such as some dummy windows users will > begin using it. I do not believe that PostgreSQL needs native windowz > support. Ooops. I'm a Linux user too, but i have a SCO Openserver, UnixWare, Netware and lot of windows boxes in my office. Also I have Informix, Sybase ... etc. This isn't for my entertainment. Our customers need to "use a real database server". But what about small business? A lot of our small customers can't spent money for dedicated linux box :((( I spent 2 month in trying open source databases (PostgreSQL, SAP DB, Interbase/Firebird) finaly i choose PostgreSQL. Now we port one of our products from Sybase SQL Anywhere to PostgreSQL. We have more than 100 customers with small networks (2-10). Most of them cant't aford dedicated linux box. Another situation DHL Bulgaria and TNT Worldwide Express Bulgaria are our customers too. In HQ they choose windows nt (i don't comment how "smart" is this decision), pay a lot of money to mr.Gates and now what - we say PostgreSQL is great , but ...... ( and i have personal contacts with their sysadmins i don't believe they are "dummy windows users") So if you don't want windows support just don't use it!!!!!
Hi, On Sat, 2002-12-14 at 15:31, Igor Georgiev wrote: <snip> > In HQ they choose windows nt (i don't comment how "smart" is this decision), > pay a lot of money to mr.Gates and now what - we say PostgreSQL is great , > but ...... > ( and i have personal contacts with their sysadmins i don't believe they are > "dummy windows users") Hey, I did not say that "any windowz user is dummy". If you read my previous post from the beginning; you'll see that my target is MySQL users on Windows... What I've been trying to say that is: If we have a chance to choose, I'd prefer using PostgreSQL in *nix systems. This is what I've been doing since 2,5 years. > So if you don't want windows support just don't use it!!!!! I can't, even if I want it; since I do not have a windows installed computer. ;-) Anyway, this will be a "windows-linux" discussion; which is offtopic for this list. Best regards, -- Devrim GUNDUZ TR.NET System Support Specialist devrim@tr.net
Devrim G?ND?Z wrote: > I do NOT like hearing about MySQL in this (these) list(s). > > PostgreSQL is not in the same category with MySQL. MySQL is for > *dummies*, not database admins. I do not even call it a database. I > have never forgotten my data loss 2,5 years ago; when I used MySQL for > just 2 months!!! I think you're on to something here, but it's obscured by the way you said it. There's no question in my mind that PostgreSQL is superior in almost every way to MySQL. For those of us who are technically minded, it boggles the mind that people would choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. Yet they do. And it's important to understand why. Simply saying "MySQL has better marketing" isn't enough. It's too simple an answer and obscures some issues that should probably be addressed. People use MySQL because it's very easy to set up, relatively easy to maintain (when something doesn't go wrong, that is), is very well documented and supported, and is initially adequate for the task they have in mind (that the task may change significantly such that MySQL is no longer adequate is something only those with experience will consider). PostgreSQL has come a long way and, with the exception of a few minor things (the need to VACUUM, for instance. The current version makes the VACUUM requirement almost a non-issue as regards performance and availability, but it really should be something that the database takes care of itself), is equivalent to MySQL in the above things except for documentation and support. MySQL's documentation is very, very good. My experience with it is that it's possible, and relatively easy, to find information about almost anything you might need to know. PostgreSQL's documentation is good, but not quite as good as MySQL's. It's not quite as complete. For instance, I didn't find any documentation at all in the User's Guide or Administrator's Guide on creating tables (if I missed it, then that might illustrate that the documentation needs to be organized slightly differently). I did find a little in the tutorial (about the amount that you'd want in a tutorial), but to find out more I had to go to the SQL statement reference (in my case I was looking for the means by which one could create a constraint on a column during table creation time). The reason this is important is that the documentation is *the* way people are going to learn the database. If it's too sparse or too disorganized, people who don't have a lot of time to spend searching through the documentation for something may well decide that a different product (such as MySQL) would suit their needs better. The documentation for PostgreSQL improves all the time, largely in response to comments such as this one, and that's a very good thing. My purpose in bringing this up is to show you what PostgreSQL is up against in terms of widespread adoption. > If we want to "sell" PostgreSQL, we should talk about, maybe, Oracle. > I have never took care of MySQL said. I just know that I'm running > PostgreSQL since 2,5 years and I only stopped it "JUST" before upgrades > of PostgreSQL. It's just *working*; which is unfamiliar to MySQL > users. The experience people have with MySQL varies a lot, and much of it has to do with the load people put on it. If MySQL were consistently bad and unreliable it would have a much smaller following (since it's not in a monopoly position the way Microsoft is). But you're mistaken if you believe that MySQL isn't competition for PostgreSQL. It is, because it serves the same purpose: a means of storing information in an easily retrievable way. Selling potential MySQL users on PostgreSQL should be easier than doing the same for Oracle users because potential MySQL users have at least already decided that a free database is worthy of consideration. As their needs grow beyond what MySQL offers, they'll look for a more capable database engine. It's a target market that we'd be idiots to ignore, and we do so at our peril (the more people out there using MySQL, the fewer there are using PostgreSQL). > I'm a Linux user. I'm happy that PostgreSQL does not have win32 version. > If someone wants to use a real database server, then they should install > Linux (or *bsd,etc). This is what Oracle offers,too. Native Windows > support will cause some problems; such as some dummy windows users will > begin using it. I do not believe that PostgreSQL needs native windowz > support. I hate to break it to you (assuming that I didn't misunderstand what you said), but Oracle offers a native Windows port of their database engine, and has done so for some time. It's *stupid* to ignore the native Windows market. There are a lot of people who need a database engine to store their data and who would benefit from a native Windows implementation of PostgreSQL, but aren't interested in the additional burden of setting up a Linux server because they lack the money, time, or expertise. > So, hackers (I'm not a hacker) should decide whether PostgreSQL should > be used widely in real database apps, or it should be used even by dummy > users? What makes you think we can't meet the needs of both groups? The capabilities of PostgreSQL are (with very few exceptions) a superset of MySQL's, which means that wherever someone deploys a MySQL server, they could probably have deployed a PostgreSQL server in its place. It should be an easy sell: they get a database engine that is significantly more capable than MySQL for the same low price! Selling to the Oracle market is going to be harder. The capabilities of Oracle are a superset of those of PostgreSQL. Shops which plan to deploy a database server and who need the capabilities of PostgreSQL at a minimum are going to look at Oracle for the same reason that shops which at a minimum need the capabilities of MySQL would be smart to look at PostgreSQL: their needs may grow over time and changing the database mid-project is difficult and time-consuming. The difference is that the prices of MySQL and PostgreSQL are the same, while the prices of PostgreSQL and Oracle are vastly different. That's not to say that going after the Oracle market shouldn't be done (quite the opposite, provided it's done honestly), only that *not* going after the MySQL market is folly. -- Kevin Brown kevin@sysexperts.com
Kevin Brown wrote: > Devrim G?ND?Z wrote: > > I do NOT like hearing about MySQL in this (these) list(s). > > > > PostgreSQL is not in the same category with MySQL. MySQL is for > > *dummies*, not database admins. I do not even call it a database. I > > have never forgotten my data loss 2,5 years ago; when I used MySQL for > > just 2 months!!! > > I think you're on to something here, but it's obscured by the way you > said it. > > There's no question in my mind that PostgreSQL is superior in almost > every way to MySQL. For those of us who are technically minded, it > boggles the mind that people would choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. Yet > they do. And it's important to understand why. > > Simply saying "MySQL has better marketing" isn't enough. It's too > simple an answer and obscures some issues that should probably be > addressed. I think it /is/ a significant factor, the point being that the MySQL company has been quite activist in pressing MySQL as "the answer," to the point to which there's a development strategy called "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + (Perl|Python|PHP)). > People use MySQL because it's very easy to set up, relatively easy to > maintain (when something doesn't go wrong, that is), is very well > documented and supported, and is initially adequate for the task they > have in mind (that the task may change significantly such that MySQL > is no longer adequate is something only those with experience will > consider). ... And the consistent marketing pressure that in essence claims: - It's easier to use than any alternative;- It's much faster than any other DBMS;- It's plenty powerful and robust enough. As near as I can tell, /none/ of these things are true outside of very carefully selected application domains. But the claims have been presented enough times that people actually believe them to be true. > PostgreSQL has come a long way and, with the exception of a few minor > things (the need to VACUUM, for instance. The current version makes > the VACUUM requirement almost a non-issue as regards performance and > availability, but it really should be something that the database > takes care of itself), is equivalent to MySQL in the above things > except for documentation and support. I would point to a third thing: Tools to support "hands-off administration." My web hosting provider has a set of tools to let me administer various aspects of my site complete with "pretty GUI" that covers:- Configuring email accounts, including mailing lists, Spam Assassin,and such;- Configuring subdomains;- Managing files/directories, doing backups;- Apache configuration;- Cron jobs;- A couple of"shopping cart" systems;- A "chat room system;"- Last, but certainly not least, the ability to manage MySQL databases. There is no "canned" equivalent for PostgreSQL, which means that ISPs that don't have people with DBMS expertise will be inclined to prefer MySQL. It's a better choice for them. > MySQL's documentation is very, very good. My experience with it is > that it's possible, and relatively easy, to find information about > almost anything you might need to know. > > PostgreSQL's documentation is good, but not quite as good as MySQL's. > It's not quite as complete. For instance, I didn't find any > documentation at all in the User's Guide or Administrator's Guide on > creating tables (if I missed it, then that might illustrate that the > documentation needs to be organized slightly differently). I did find > a little in the tutorial (about the amount that you'd want in a > tutorial), but to find out more I had to go to the SQL statement > reference (in my case I was looking for the means by which one could > create a constraint on a column during table creation time). > > The reason this is important is that the documentation is *the* way > people are going to learn the database. If it's too sparse or too > disorganized, people who don't have a lot of time to spend searching > through the documentation for something may well decide that a > different product (such as MySQL) would suit their needs better. > > The documentation for PostgreSQL improves all the time, largely in > response to comments such as this one, and that's a very good thing. > My purpose in bringing this up is to show you what PostgreSQL is up > against in terms of widespread adoption. That's probably pretty fair. I'm using the word "fair" advisedly, too. If someone objects, saying that PostgreSQL docs /are/ good, keep in mind that new users are not mandated to be "fair" about this. If they have trouble finding what they were looking for, they couldn't care less that you think the docs are pretty good: /they/ didn't find what /they/ were looking for, and that's all they care about. > > If we want to "sell" PostgreSQL, we should talk about, maybe, Oracle. > > I have never took care of MySQL said. I just know that I'm running > > PostgreSQL since 2,5 years and I only stopped it "JUST" before upgrades > > of PostgreSQL. It's just *working*; which is unfamiliar to MySQL > > users. > > The experience people have with MySQL varies a lot, and much of it has > to do with the load people put on it. If MySQL were consistently bad > and unreliable it would have a much smaller following (since it's not > in a monopoly position the way Microsoft is). > > But you're mistaken if you believe that MySQL isn't competition for > PostgreSQL. It is, because it serves the same purpose: a means of > storing information in an easily retrievable way. Indeed. People with modest data storage requirements that came in with /no/ comprehension of what a "relational" database is may find the limited functionality of MySQL perfectly reasonable for their purposes. And I'll pull in a quote I saw on comp.databases this week that I think is quite fabulous: ------------------------------------------------------------- >>if you mean by "ideal" that it runs on Unix and crashes all the time >>and needs a bazillion DBA's to keep them running and you want to >>constantly recover your database and your data files, then you can >>have ideal. > A little background on my original comment might be in order. I > don't tend to use the term "ideal" myself, much. I was referring to > a comment made fairly frequently in this forum, to the effect that > "A commercial Relational Databse system has never been built." These > people exclude Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Informix, Interbase, yada > yada, because all of them fail, in one way or another to live up to > the "ideal" of a truly relational system. I have a hard time with such > terminological rigidity, myself. One can say that all those products > aren't perfect relational products, but one shouldn't, in my view, say > that they "aren't even relational". Why do you think that they are "relational" ? Do they operate on relations ? I don't think so. If their primary business is not to operate on relations but on bags of rows, calling them relational is misleading. Just like ODBMS are often database construction kits or persistence libraries, SQL DBMSes are a real DBMS (they do provide transactions, recovery, concurrency control, some data integrity) + a *relational construction kit*. Meaning that by a skillful use of SQL one can come somewhere close to a relational database. But the complexity is left on the user to shoulder, and it is very difficult to stretch SQL so that you are still in the realm of relational model. And guess what: most users don't and most users suffer as a consequence. It's even worse than that : very often product documentation and books sponsored by the vendors (Oracle press: anyone there ?) simply lie to the users by defining relational model in the most ridiculous terms. Actually they screwed up their products, they built a multi-billion dollars industry by taking agressive shortcuts on the implementation side and transfering the complexity to the user and now they try to lie and cheat by proclaiming their version of "relational" (not long ago the auto industry maintained seat belts and airbags were unnecessarily expensive and not needed). Best regards, Costin Cozianu ------------------------------------------------------------- The interesting argument that Costin makes is that SQL databases are /not/ "relational databases," but rather that they are tools that can be used to construct relational database systems. PostgreSQL has enough decent constructs, what with mature implementations of foreign keys, views, and constraints that it is fairly easy to build relational systems using PostgreSQL. In contrast, the paucity of supportive constructs in MySQL means that neither the database nor the resulting applications are likely to be terribly "relational" in the senses intended by Codd and Date. > Selling potential MySQL users on PostgreSQL should be easier than > doing the same for Oracle users because potential MySQL users have at > least already decided that a free database is worthy of consideration. > As their needs grow beyond what MySQL offers, they'll look for a more > capable database engine. It's a target market that we'd be idiots to > ignore, and we do so at our peril (the more people out there using > MySQL, the fewer there are using PostgreSQL). The unfortunate part is that those that outgrow MySQL are likely to have /two/ misconceptions: 1. That the only /real/ reliability improvement will come in moving to something like Oracle; 2. That PostgreSQL will be a huge step backwards into performance problems because it is "so much slower." That these are misconceptions does not prevent people from believing them. (The third deceptive misconception I see is that MySQL is somehow "more standard" than some of its competitors.) > > I'm a Linux user. I'm happy that PostgreSQL does not have win32 version. > > If someone wants to use a real database server, then they should install > > Linux (or *bsd,etc). This is what Oracle offers,too. Native Windows > > support will cause some problems; such as some dummy windows users will > > begin using it. I do not believe that PostgreSQL needs native windowz > > support. > > I hate to break it to you (assuming that I didn't misunderstand what > you said), but Oracle offers a native Windows port of their database > engine, and has done so for some time. It's *stupid* to ignore the > native Windows market. There are a lot of people who need a database > engine to store their data and who would benefit from a native Windows > implementation of PostgreSQL, but aren't interested in the additional > burden of setting up a Linux server because they lack the money, time, > or expertise. I think it would be a Bad Thing if making PostgreSQL support Windows better were to compromise how well it works on Unix, but I haven't seen evidence of anyone actually proposing patches that would have that result. > > So, hackers (I'm not a hacker) should decide whether PostgreSQL should > > be used widely in real database apps, or it should be used even by dummy > > users? > > What makes you think we can't meet the needs of both groups? The > capabilities of PostgreSQL are (with very few exceptions) a superset > of MySQL's, which means that wherever someone deploys a MySQL server, > they could probably have deployed a PostgreSQL server in its place. > It should be an easy sell: they get a database engine that is > significantly more capable than MySQL for the same low price! You can't sell into the "ISP appliance market" until there's something as ubiquitous as "PHPMyAdmin" for PostgreSQL. And note that the "ISP appliance market" only cares about this in a very indirect way. They don't actually use the database; their /customers/ do. And their customers are likely to be fairly unsophisticated souls who will use whatever database is given to them. > Selling to the Oracle market is going to be harder. The capabilities > of Oracle are a superset of those of PostgreSQL. Shops which plan to > deploy a database server and who need the capabilities of PostgreSQL > at a minimum are going to look at Oracle for the same reason that > shops which at a minimum need the capabilities of MySQL would be smart > to look at PostgreSQL: their needs may grow over time and changing the > database mid-project is difficult and time-consuming. The difference > is that the prices of MySQL and PostgreSQL are the same, while the > prices of PostgreSQL and Oracle are vastly different. There are Oracle markets /not/ worth going after, at this point. You /don't/ go after the "ERP" markets or the data center markets where license budgets are in millions of dollars, and where it's going to be tough to take PostgreSQL seriously when Oracle is entirely prepared to send in a group of 10 technical marketing people to swamp the customer with marketing information. What /is/ worth going after is the "small server" market, for departmental applications. It's not "big bucks;" in the Oracle realm, it might lead to a licensing fee of $20K. For $20K, they aren't going to send in a swarm of marketers to fight for the account. > That's not to say that going after the Oracle market shouldn't be done > (quite the opposite, provided it's done honestly), only that *not* > going after the MySQL market is folly. Indeed. It is almost a "necessary defense" to counter the deceptive claims that are made. If nobody says anything, people may actually /believe/ that PostgreSQL is vastly slower. -- (reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.gultn@" "enworbbc")) http://cbbrowne.com/info/nonrdbms.html "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- First Baron Acton, 1834 - 1902
> You can't sell into the "ISP appliance market" until there's something as > ubiquitous as "PHPMyAdmin" for PostgreSQL. And note that the "ISP appliance > market" only cares about this in a very indirect way. They don't actually use > the database; their /customers/ do. And their customers are likely to be > fairly unsophisticated souls who will use whatever database is given to them. Hey! What about phpPgAdmin? We're actually working on a next generation version atm which is a total rewrite that: 1. modern php 2. register_globals off, full error checking 3. themable 4. Easily supports all versions 5. etc. However, even with repeated calls for developers, it's just me and Rob Treat! phpPgAdmin does not work with 7.3 so this in an increasingly important project. Anyone wanna help? :) http://phppgdamin.sourceforge.net/ Maybe we should move to gborg? Chris
cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com wrote: > Kevin Brown wrote: > > Simply saying "MySQL has better marketing" isn't enough. It's too > > simple an answer and obscures some issues that should probably be > > addressed. > > I think it /is/ a significant factor, the point being that the MySQL company > has been quite activist in pressing MySQL as "the answer," to the point to > which there's a development strategy called "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + > (Perl|Python|PHP)). Oh, I'll certainly not dispute that marketing has had a significant effect, but I don't think it's the only reason for MySQL's success. History has a lot to do with it, because it's through history that momentum gets built up, as it has with MySQL. > > People use MySQL because it's very easy to set up, relatively easy to > > maintain (when something doesn't go wrong, that is), is very well > > documented and supported, and is initially adequate for the task they > > have in mind (that the task may change significantly such that MySQL > > is no longer adequate is something only those with experience will > > consider). > > ... And the consistent marketing pressure that in essence claims: > > - It's easier to use than any alternative; > - It's much faster than any other DBMS; > - It's plenty powerful and robust enough. > > As near as I can tell, /none/ of these things are true outside of very > carefully selected application domains. But the claims have been presented > enough times that people actually believe them to be true. I agree with you -- now. But the situation as it is now has not always been. Consider where PostgreSQL was 4 years ago. I believe it was at version 6 at that time, if I remember correctly. And as I recall, many people had very significant issues with it in the key areas of performance and reliability. Now, I didn't experience these things firsthand because I wasn't using it at the time, but it is the general impression I got when reading the accounts of people who *were* using it. MySQL at the time wasn't necessarily any more reliable, but it had one thing going for it that PostgreSQL didn't: myisamchk. Even if the database crashed, you stood a very good chance of being able to recover your data without having to restore from backups. PostgreSQL didn't have this at all: either you had to be a guru with the PostgreSQL database format or you had to restore from backups. That meant that *in practice* MySQL was easier to maintain, even it crashed more often as PostgreSQL, because the amount of administrative effort to deal with a MySQL crash was so much less. > > PostgreSQL has come a long way and, with the exception of a few minor > > things (the need to VACUUM, for instance. The current version makes > > the VACUUM requirement almost a non-issue as regards performance and > > availability, but it really should be something that the database > > takes care of itself), is equivalent to MySQL in the above things > > except for documentation and support. > > I would point to a third thing: Tools to support "hands-off > administration." My web hosting provider has a set of tools to let > me administer various aspects of my site complete with "pretty GUI" > that covers: > > - Configuring email accounts, including mailing lists, Spam > Assassin, and such; > - Configuring subdomains; > - Managing files/directories, doing backups; > - Apache configuration; > - Cron jobs; > - A couple of "shopping cart" systems; > - A "chat room system;" > - Last, but certainly not least, the ability to manage MySQL > databases. > > There is no "canned" equivalent for PostgreSQL, which means that > ISPs that don't have people with DBMS expertise will be inclined to > prefer MySQL. It's a better choice for them. This is true, but the only way to combat that is to get PostgreSQL more widely deployed. Network effects such as that are common in the computing world, so it doesn't come as much surprise that the most popular database engine in the webhosting world is the best supported one for that role. It's only because of the relative popularity of MySQL that it has so much support. The only way to grow PostgreSQL's popularity is to get it deployed in situations where the tools available for it are sufficient. > > But you're mistaken if you believe that MySQL isn't competition for > > PostgreSQL. It is, because it serves the same purpose: a means of > > storing information in an easily retrievable way. > > Indeed. People with modest data storage requirements that came in > with /no/ comprehension of what a "relational" database is may find > the limited functionality of MySQL perfectly reasonable for their > purposes. This is true, but the biggest problem is that the requirements of a project often balloon over time, and the demands on the database backend will also tend to increase. Because MySQL is rather limited in its functionality, it doesn't take much until you'll be forced to use a different database backend. This is why I view PostgreSQL as a much wiser choice in almost all cases where you need a database engine. Your needs will have to be quite considerable before PostgreSQL's capabilities are no longer enough. > PostgreSQL has enough decent constructs, what with mature > implementations of foreign keys, views, and constraints that it is > fairly easy to build relational systems using PostgreSQL. In > contrast, the paucity of supportive constructs in MySQL means that > neither the database nor the resulting applications are likely to be > terribly "relational" in the senses intended by Codd and Date. This is true, but what everyone fails to ask is whether or not any particular customer really *cares* about that. The customer isn't interested in whether or not an application is "relational", they care whether or not the application does the job it's supposed to. How "relational" it is is an implementation detail to them. The reason that PostgreSQL wins over MySQL is not so much that it's easier to build relational systems with it, but that it's easier to build *reliable* systems with it. That building the system in a relational way is one way to achieve that is, again, an implementation detail. > > Selling potential MySQL users on PostgreSQL should be easier than > > doing the same for Oracle users because potential MySQL users have at > > least already decided that a free database is worthy of consideration. > > As their needs grow beyond what MySQL offers, they'll look for a more > > capable database engine. It's a target market that we'd be idiots to > > ignore, and we do so at our peril (the more people out there using > > MySQL, the fewer there are using PostgreSQL). > > The unfortunate part is that those that outgrow MySQL are likely to > have /two/ misconceptions: > > 1. That the only /real/ reliability improvement will come in moving to > something like Oracle; > > 2. That PostgreSQL will be a huge step backwards into performance problems > because it is "so much slower." This is because people lack familiarity with PostgreSQL. That's where marketing PostgreSQL well comes in. The performance misconception is the result of history. At one time PostgreSQL *was* much slower than MySQL. People need to be informed of the current state of affairs. > That these are misconceptions does not prevent people from believing them. > (The third deceptive misconception I see is that MySQL is somehow "more > standard" than some of its competitors.) The third misconception happens because most people equate "standard" with "popular". And in the real world, they're not entirely wrong to do so, unfortunately. > I think it would be a Bad Thing if making PostgreSQL support Windows > better were to compromise how well it works on Unix, but I haven't > seen evidence of anyone actually proposing patches that would have > that result. I agree, and I also believe that the maintainers would not accept a patch that compromised the performance under Unix for the sake of supporting Windows. And rightly so: such a patch would indicate that the people doing the Windows port haven't solved the problem properly. > You can't sell into the "ISP appliance market" until there's > something as ubiquitous as "PHPMyAdmin" for PostgreSQL. But there is: PHPPgAdmin (or whatever it's called these days. I seem to remember that they changed the name of it). Unfortunately it's not as well known, largely because PostgreSQL itself isn't as well known. > And note that the "ISP appliance market" only cares about this in a > very indirect way. They don't actually use the database; their > /customers/ do. And their customers are likely to be fairly > unsophisticated souls who will use whatever database is given to > them. And if that's *really* true, then providers will do just as well to provide PostgreSQL as they would MySQL (since their customers will just use whatever database they're given). So it's really a question of selling the providers on it, which (as you mentioned earlier) is in part a matter of giving them the tools they need to make managing a PostgreSQL installation easy. > There are Oracle markets /not/ worth going after, at this point. > You /don't/ go after the "ERP" markets or the data center markets > where license budgets are in millions of dollars, and where it's > going to be tough to take PostgreSQL seriously when Oracle is > entirely prepared to send in a group of 10 technical marketing > people to swamp the customer with marketing information. This is why marketing PostgreSQL *honestly* is so important. If it won't do the ERP job well, then it behooves those who are promoting it to realize that and restrain themselves appropriately. > What /is/ worth going after is the "small server" market, for > departmental applications. It's not "big bucks;" in the Oracle > realm, it might lead to a licensing fee of $20K. For $20K, they > aren't going to send in a swarm of marketers to fight for the > account. And this is exactly one of the markets that MySQL is currently targeting. Of course, MS-SQL is *also* targeting this market, with a reasonable amount of success. PostgreSQL is a *perfect* fit for this kind of operation, and it's one of the reasons that it really *is* important to have a native Windows port. > > That's not to say that going after the Oracle market shouldn't be done > > (quite the opposite, provided it's done honestly), only that *not* > > going after the MySQL market is folly. > > Indeed. > > It is almost a "necessary defense" to counter the deceptive claims > that are made. If nobody says anything, people may actually > /believe/ that PostgreSQL is vastly slower. The way you counter such deceptive claims is to provide proof that those claims are wrong. Point them at the head-to-head comparison on the PHPBuilder site. Prove to them that PostgreSQL is in the same league (if not better) as MySQL in the performance arena. And for deity's sake, show them how much *less* work they'd have to do under PostgreSQL because of its referential integrity features. I really think most people would be willing to sacrifice a small bit of speed if it meant doing a whole lot less work. Copied to the advocacy group because of the relevance. -- Kevin Brown kevin@sysexperts.com