Postgres vs commercial products

Steve Doliov wrote:Postgres offered banner ads for a while. SPeaking of
promoting it, is

postgres willing to create a logo a la apache, powered by postgresql?
it'll be up on my site in no time at all.

Since I last made a batch of logo's to prompt comments, I've been meaning to
make a "serious" attempt again but keep getting side tracked. View
http://www.nettek-llc.com/postgresql/. Hopefully soon, I will spend a
weekend on making something mo'better. Comments are welcome.

-STEVEl

At 23:36 +0300 on 21/7/98, Steve Doliov wrote:

in commercial enterprises such as Oracle, INnformix and Sybase, whether to
implement a feature or part of a standard gets boiled down to a business
decision/question -- will adding this or that create more profit for the
company? if the answer is no, the feature or standard spec dies.

at postgres the story is different. the question is, will the feature be
useful? if the answer is yes, unless it is beyond the scope of the
developers, it will get implemented.

Not that I want to offend the Postgres developers, who are doing a great
job. But in the same way that commercial enterprises think in terms of
profit, volunteer workers think of it like this: Does it interest me to
implement this feature? Do I have the time? Do I have the expertise?

Commercial companies will make the time if there is profit. They will also
train their workers if they don't have the expertise. And wheather or not
the workers enjoy what they are doing is not an issue...

Commercial enterprises *are* customer-focused. If they can offer a feature
which will make a customer prefer them over the competition, they will
implement it. There is a strong correlation between profit and client
satisfaction - at least, in a competitive market (which, unlike the OS
market, IS true for databases).

Here in the university, my bosses seriously consider moving to a commercial
product - either Oracle or Informix. There will be two reasons for it:

* Compatibility with software. Most RADs and server-side whatever work
with one of the mentioned commercial products. Some work with ODBC,
but I think that at this moment, nobody actually tried them with
the PostgreSQL ODBC driver.

* Replication server etc. - very important for our sysadmin. Even a
reliable backup facility. I've seen too many complaints on the lists,
plus saw an actual glitch myself, to trust in pg_dump. Moreover, I
have to invest extra time in making pg_dump into a solution with
scheduled backups and alerts for tape changes and whatnot...

* Features.

The only real advantage Postgres has at the moment is its price...

One last comment: We are based on Solaris/sparc. So as far as I'm
concerned, commercial products are already here. Their intended invasion
into the linux market will make the situation exactly similar to mine.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma

On Tue, 21 Jul 1998, Steve Logue wrote:

postgres willing to create a logo a la apache, powered by postgresql?
it'll be up on my site in no time at all.

Since I last made a batch of logo's to prompt comments, I've been meaning to
make a "serious" attempt again but keep getting side tracked. View
http://www.nettek-llc.com/postgresql/. Hopefully soon, I will spend a
weekend on making something mo'better. Comments are welcome.

I almost hate to ask, and really, it's not a big deal to me personally,
but why is it called "PostgreSQL"?

--
Amos Hayes Systems Architect
ahayes@ingenia.com Ingenia Group - Software Kinetics Ltd.
http://smurf.ingenia.com/~ahayes http://www.ingenia.com

"Remember: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
- ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Brett W. McCoy wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

I almost hate to ask, and really, it's not a big deal to me personally,
but why is it called "PostgreSQL"?

Originally it was just Postgres, and didn't support any SQL. When it was
redesigned with SQL support, that's when the SQL postfix came about.
Actually, it was known as Postgres95 originally to differentiate it from
the original Postgres, but as it moved towards SQL compliancy, the SQL
postfix becamse the norm. The full story is in the PostgreSQL
documentation.

Thanks for the reply Brett.

Has there ever been any discussion about a new name? It doesn't matter to
me but it would seem that with the current discussions about promotion and
competition, it might help to have a more "public friendly" name. It is
not obvious to me what a "postgres" is nor what it would do if I were to
install it. Granted that "oracle", "informix", and "sybase" are all a
little strange too, but they give hints (oracle, inform, base) about
containing knowledge. They also seem to roll off the tongue a little
easier.

Of course, changing the name (again) would be a BIG pain in the butt and
might cause current users a whole lot more confusion.

But anyway, I'm happy the thing works, is supported by a keen bunch, and
is free. Thank goodness for the RedHat installer blurbs on packages. It's
the only reason I found out about PostgreSQL in the first place.

--
Amos Hayes Systems Architect
ahayes@ingenia.com Ingenia Group - Software Kinetics Ltd.
http://smurf.ingenia.com/~ahayes http://www.ingenia.com

"Remember: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
- ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

On Tue, 21 Jul 1998, Steve Logue wrote:

postgres willing to create a logo a la apache, powered by postgresql?
it'll be up on my site in no time at all.

Since I last made a batch of logo's to prompt comments, I've been meaning to
make a "serious" attempt again but keep getting side tracked. View
http://www.nettek-llc.com/postgresql/. Hopefully soon, I will spend a
weekend on making something mo'better. Comments are welcome.

I almost hate to ask, and really, it's not a big deal to me personally,
but why is it called "PostgreSQL"?

It used to be called Postgres95, which was Jolly and Andrew's
"joke/play" on Windows95...when it came time to rename it, we wanted to
maintain the 'history' of it being a Postgres4.2 based system, while
bringing forward the fact that it no longer maintained the old non-SQL
based query language...so the name PostgreSQL arose....

Pronounced: Postgres-Q-L

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

I almost hate to ask, and really, it's not a big deal to me personally,
but why is it called "PostgreSQL"?

Originally it was just Postgres, and didn't support any SQL. When it was
redesigned with SQL support, that's when the SQL postfix came about.
Actually, it was known as Postgres95 originally to differentiate it from
the original Postgres, but as it moved towards SQL compliancy, the SQL
postfix becamse the norm. The full story is in the PostgreSQL
documentation.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected."
-- The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Brett W. McCoy wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

Has there ever been any discussion about a new name? It doesn't matter to
me but it would seem that with the current discussions about promotion and
competition, it might help to have a more "public friendly" name. It is
not obvious to me what a "postgres" is nor what it would do if I were to
install it. Granted that "oracle", "informix", and "sybase" are all a
little strange too, but they give hints (oracle, inform, base) about
containing knowledge. They also seem to roll off the tongue a little
easier.

Actually, I think Postgres originally came out of the Ingres family,

Other way around, actually...Ingres is a branch off the original
Postgres source code...

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

Has there ever been any discussion about a new name? It doesn't matter to
me but it would seem that with the current discussions about promotion and
competition, it might help to have a more "public friendly" name. It is
not obvious to me what a "postgres" is nor what it would do if I were to
install it. Granted that "oracle", "informix", and "sybase" are all a
little strange too, but they give hints (oracle, inform, base) about
containing knowledge. They also seem to roll off the tongue a little
easier.

Actually, I think Postgres originally came out of the Ingres family,
which is still around. It is an odd name, but sometimes odd names get
remembered. My company has a commercial database that is called
"Diogenes", and it gets remembered because it is so different from other
databases that are similar (like Medline or other healthcare related
online databases).

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected."
-- The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Brett W. McCoy wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

Has there ever been any discussion about a new name? It doesn't matter to
me but it would seem that with the current discussions about promotion and
competition, it might help to have a more "public friendly" name. It is
not obvious to me what a "postgres" is nor what it would do if I were to
install it. Granted that "oracle", "informix", and "sybase" are all a
little strange too, but they give hints (oracle, inform, base) about
containing knowledge. They also seem to roll off the tongue a little
easier.

Actually, I think Postgres originally came out of the Ingres family,

Other way around, actually...Ingres is a branch off the original
Postgres source code...

University Ingres was first, then commercial Ingres was a split-off.
PostgreSQL is based on University Ingres.

-- 
Bruce Momjian                          |  830 Blythe Avenue
maillist@candle.pha.pa.us              |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  (610) 353-9879(w)
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  (610) 853-3000(h)

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Bruce Momjian wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Brett W. McCoy wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Amos Hayes wrote:

Has there ever been any discussion about a new name? It doesn't matter to
me but it would seem that with the current discussions about promotion and
competition, it might help to have a more "public friendly" name. It is
not obvious to me what a "postgres" is nor what it would do if I were to
install it. Granted that "oracle", "informix", and "sybase" are all a
little strange too, but they give hints (oracle, inform, base) about
containing knowledge. They also seem to roll off the tongue a little
easier.

Actually, I think Postgres originally came out of the Ingres family,

Other way around, actually...Ingres is a branch off the original
Postgres source code...

University Ingres was first, then commercial Ingres was a split-off.
PostgreSQL is based on University Ingres.

I stand corrected...I didn't even *know* there was a University
Ingres :(

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Bruce Momjian wrote:

University Ingres was first, then commercial Ingres was a split-off.
PostgreSQL is based on University Ingres.

That's what I thought...

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected."
-- The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Herouth Maoz wrote:

Not that I want to offend the Postgres developers, who are doing a great
job. But in the same way that commercial enterprises think in terms of
profit, volunteer workers think of it like this: Does it interest me to
implement this feature? Do I have the time? Do I have the expertise?

I don't believe any offence could be taken by this...my question
back is are those features that are currently missing of such an import to
you that you'd be willing to pay one of the developers to take the time to
focus on what you require?

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org

At 21:12 +0300 on 22/7/98, Bruce Momjian wrote:

University Ingres was first, then commercial Ingres was a split-off.
PostgreSQL is based on University Ingres.

Which also explains the name... Remember the old lesson in data structures
about pre-order, in-order and post-order traversal of binary trees?

Well, if you have an in-gres, then you can also have a pre-gres and a
post-gres. Pre-gres would imply that it is older, less advanced than
ingres. Hence Postgres.

QED :-)

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma

At 4:23 +0300 on 24/7/98, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

I don't believe any offence could be taken by this...my question
back is are those features that are currently missing of such an import to
you that you'd be willing to pay one of the developers to take the time to
focus on what you require?

If I have to pay the authors for doing what I want, I am going to buy
Informix or Oracle tomorrow... As I said, Postgres's main merit is that
it's free.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma

On Sun, 26 Jul 1998, Herouth Maoz wrote:

At 4:23 +0300 on 24/7/98, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

I don't believe any offence could be taken by this...my question
back is are those features that are currently missing of such an import to
you that you'd be willing to pay one of the developers to take the time to
focus on what you require?

If I have to pay the authors for doing what I want, I am going to buy
Informix or Oracle tomorrow... As I said, Postgres's main merit is that
it's free.

Nobody said anything about *having* to pay for anything. The
question was whether or not ppl feel that a particular unsupported feature
was important enough to them, *right now* to cover the costs of paying a
contract programmer to do it *right now*.

Its a matter of some company saying "I need this feature right
now, and am willing to throw X dollars at it to get it moved to a higher
priority position to get it done" vs. "right now, this feature isn't
scheduale till v6.4 or v6.5 or...etc"...

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org

Um - let me get this straight... you want to go buy Oracle instead of
kicking in a few bucks to pay someone to add it to PostgreSQL.

OK then a quick call to Oracle would tell you that it's $295 per user, 5
user minimum. If you want to use it on the web for public use that's 20
minimum or about $6,000. Plus they suggest getting their application
server for another $195 / user - pushing your web site up by another
$4,000.

Go ahead.

I know if PostgreSQL did almost everything I needed I would rather:

A) Write it myself
B) Ask about it on the list and see if other people know how to do it
C) Expense out $500 or $1000 to contribute to PostgreSQL and then let the
company write it off.

in that order ;-)

Chris

On Sun, 26 Jul 1998, Herouth Maoz wrote:

At 19:28 +0300 on 27/7/98, Chris Johnson wrote:

Um - let me get this straight... you want to go buy Oracle instead of
kicking in a few bucks to pay someone to add it to PostgreSQL.

OK then a quick call to Oracle would tell you that it's $295 per user, 5
user minimum. If you want to use it on the web for public use that's 20
minimum or about $6,000. Plus they suggest getting their application
server for another $195 / user - pushing your web site up by another
$4,000.

I'll skip their application server. $6000 for Oracle? Sounds awfully cheap
to me. You get the benefit of all those features for which I'd have to pay
the Postgres creators, who in one year decide they want to take a vacation
in Timbuktu, and their features will go with them...

Won't happen? In the last couple of weeks I've seen a dozen questions
pertaining to Postgres's object capabilities, such as how to cleanly insert
values of a contained type and how to select them back. Up to this minute,
nobody answered. To me, this indicates that the "O" in PostgreSQL's ORDBMS
claim is no longer maintained.

When you rely on an organization to maintain something, you know that even
if someone gets married or dies in a car accident, your application will
continue to be supported. If I pay an individual to do it, can you make the
same claim?

Besides, there's no way I could get away with paying an individual any sum
of money. It's not my money - it's the university's. They will pay
organizations, not individuals - unless the individual would like to sign a
contract or something. And come the next day, I need another feature, I
need to pay yet another individual. And yet another.

Never mind having a Postgres version which nobody else has, meaning I won't
be able to apply patches as they are posted for the main version - or
should I pay *all* the Postgres developers so that they will all finish
development, testing and beta to make everybody's version the same as mine?

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma

Um - let me get this straight... you want to go buy Oracle instead of
kicking in a few bucks to pay someone to add it to PostgreSQL.

OK then a quick call to Oracle would tell you that it's $295 per user, 5
user minimum. If you want to use it on the web for public use that's 20
minimum or about $6,000. Plus they suggest getting their application
server for another $195 / user - pushing your web site up by another
$4,000.

I'll skip their application server. $6000 for Oracle? Sounds awfully cheap
to me. You get the benefit of all those features for which I'd have to pay
the Postgres creators, who in one year decide they want to take a vacation
in Timbuktu, and their features will go with them...

The application server increases performance by keeping connections open.
They were very vague about exactly what it did, but I am sure that you
could skip it. But the $6,000 I was quoted was for the workgroup server -
not the Enterprise version that has all the advanced stuff. For example
there is no Incremental backup, no parallel backup and recovery, no
advanced replication. If you want those features you need the "Enterprise
Edition" which is significantly more money.

As for features becoming unsupported when someone takes 'a vacation in
Timbuktu' - has that happened to Linux? Has it happened to perl? What
about your great commercial program when the vendor goes belly up - don't
the features go away then? I truly believe in Open Source software and I
trust the authors of OSS more than their commercial counterparts, but
that's just me.

Won't happen? In the last couple of weeks I've seen a dozen questions
pertaining to Postgres's object capabilities, such as how to cleanly insert
values of a contained type and how to select them back. Up to this minute,
nobody answered. To me, this indicates that the "O" in PostgreSQL's ORDBMS
claim is no longer maintained.

Not necessarily - the reply might have gone to the user directly.

When you rely on an organization to maintain something, you know that even
if someone gets married or dies in a car accident, your application will
continue to be supported. If I pay an individual to do it, can you make the
same claim?

Bullsh*t - Does MS still support DOS? Does MS still support Windows 3.X?
How about other vendors... does Lotus still support 1-2-3? Does
Ashton-Tate still support dBase?

Also note that neither I nor the person that posed the original question
to you suggested that a person individually be paid to develop the
feature. I'm suggesting that sending a small amount of money to someone
could be used to motivate having them put off other "for pay" work to do
the work on the feature for Postgres.

Putting the money aside for a moment I believe someone else already asked
you what features you thought were missing. Maybe the features you want
are probably already scheduled for development. I suspect that many if
not most are indeed somewhere in the pipe.

Besides, there's no way I could get away with paying an individual any sum
of money. It's not my money - it's the university's. They will pay
organizations, not individuals - unless the individual would like to sign a
contract or something. And come the next day, I need another feature, I
need to pay yet another individual. And yet another.

OK - get the university to donate $1,000 to the 'PostgreSQL Global
Development Group' and let them write a check for the same amount to a
developer as I mentioned above. Or make it part of a software development
class. I know I would have loved to take part in helping develop
something like Postgres as part of my database systems class.

Never mind having a Postgres version which nobody else has, meaning I won't
be able to apply patches as they are posted for the main version - or
should I pay *all* the Postgres developers so that they will all finish
development, testing and beta to make everybody's version the same as mine?

Come on - be reasonable... The person that asked if you would be willing
to pay some money to get the development of features you want was not
suggesting that you would have a special version of PostgreSQL. Any
additions made would wind up back in Postgres itself for everyone to use.

Now since you have avoided the question posed by that other person I will
ask again. What feature or features were you looking for?

Chris
(not a Postgres developer, but annoyed enough to reply)

should I pay *all* the Postgres developers so that they will all finish
development, testing and beta to make everybody's version the same as mine?

Come on - be reasonable... The person that asked if you would be willing
to pay some money to get the development of features you want was not
suggesting that you would have a special version of PostgreSQL. Any
additions made would wind up back in Postgres itself for everyone to use.

Actually, that is standard operating procedures for most software developers
whethor or not they do it in the Open Source paradigm. Its just too much of a
hassle for the developer to keep track of multiple source streams. It can be
done, but it is a monumental waste of time and money. In the end no one is
happy.

A few times in my career there have been opportunities to get certain features
added to a product, an d it was always understood that in the next release the
features would be there anyway. The key thing was that the company I was working
for knew hot change the software companies priorities. Though, PostgreSQL is a
Open Source organization, it is still an organization inhabited by living
breathing individuals who require finances to survive. So, all the getlemen was
asking was to help him change some of his developers priorities, because in most
cases its awefully hard to turn down a pay for job, in place of free one.

...james