read this and puke

All well and good, but from what I have seen and heard with Postgresql,
it is quietly and effectively running very large and complex jobs that
MySQL cannot touch.

As I was saying to my co-workers recently... is is one of the best truly
*active* database servers out there. We recently switched everything to
Postgersql from Mysql and were wondering why we didn't do it before.

Still... it would be nice to do some more marketing... a better, more
colorful, flashier Postgresql site perhaps? (I volunteer)

- Ericson Smith
eric@did-it.com
http://www.did-it.com

tony wrote:

http://r.hotwired.com/r/wn_html_link/http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,53006,00.html

MySQL a dangerous competitor to Oracle...

Guys we need a marketing department!!! Or I'll just move the application
running my nulcear power station to MySQL...

I have to read any email with that subject line. :-)

Anyway, you are right. We need such highly visible sites to help
continue our user growth. It isn't required, but it clearly helps. We
also need our users to continue telling their friends what a great
laundry soap^H^H^H^H, uh, database we are.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

tony wrote:

http://r.hotwired.com/r/wn_html_link/http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,53006,00.html

MySQL a dangerous competitor to Oracle...

While I think we all would agree that PostgreSQL is a better database, I
liked the article. As long as it's an open-source-db vs. commercial-db I
don't think PostgreSQL can lose. Sure, that article will get people
looking at MySQL and for some (probably most) people MySQL will do
everything they want... but for some it won't and they'll wonder if
there's something else out there and find PostgreSQL. That's what
happened to me...

I started with mssql, then *had* to use Oracle because of another apps
requirement, then used mySQL for some intranet stuff (didn't want to pay
for another oracle license for starters). I didn't start using PostgreSQL
until I decided i really wanted views, triggers, foreign-keys, etc.. I
still use both depending on the client (and where it's going to be
hosted). I prefer PostgreSQL, but for some things it's overkill..

Guys we need a marketing department!!! Or I'll just move the application
running my nuclear power station to MySQL...

You might also ask if you'd switch your power plant to PostgreSQL :) I
don't think I would only because of some of Tom Lane's comments regarding
PostgreSQL's appropriateness for mission critical 24/7 environments...
I'm also not saying that Oracle would be better either... I prefer to
leave nuclear power plants to Homer Simpson :)

Anyway, you are right. We need such highly visible sites to help
continue our user growth. It isn't required, but it clearly helps. We

One thing that PHP (well Zend) does that I think is pretty useful is to
have a nice case study section. For example this link about the navy
using PHP. I send that to a lot of people when they start wavering about
using PHP...

http://www.zend.com/zend/cs/csnavalready.php

Granted it means that we need to find people that are using PostgreSQL and
find someone to write about it as well, but this sort of thing is pretty
useful. Heck the whole "Community" section on zend.com is pretty nice.

I'm up for helping with website stuff (development wise) ... don't know
that I have much to offer article/case-study wise though...

-philip

Hi guys,

Along these lines, does anyone want to setup and run
jobs.postgresql.org?

It was a project which someone close to me was going to do, but for
various reasons hasn't been able to get into.

No real spec to it as of yet apart from:

- PostgreSQL community oriented site to encourage IT
Professionals to get into PostgreSQL by encouraging
and growing it's job market, etc
- No-cost posting of PostgreSQL jobs, regardless of
whether by an agency, corp, individual, etc
- Must integrate with the centralised PostgreSQL site
user and membership system already in place
(as developed for the techdocs.postgresql.org site)

Looking for self-starting team players with vision, decent experience,
and spare time more than anything, as I can tell you right now it should
be a pretty active and important PostgreSQL site when up and running.

The catch here is that 99% of everyone working on the existing
PostgreSQL website infrastructure(s) are overloaded with work as it is
and probably can't take large amounts of time to help out much, thus the
self-starter bit.

:-)

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

Granted it means that we need to find people that are using PostgreSQL and
find someone to write about it as well, but this sort of thing is pretty
useful. Heck the whole "Community" section on zend.com is pretty nice.

I think you've made a very good point here- I went to the "user gallery"
early in my evaluation of PostgreSQL, and found that it was not organized in
a useful way. A few in-depth case studies or a more useful way to slice &
dice the data would be a great improvement.

It looks like the gallery is connected to pgsql.com, rather than
PostgreSQL.org. maybe somebody on the org side could do something nicer on
the main site. Our company would probably be willing to supply information
for a case-study.

Some of the ways to slice the info that might help for evaluators would be:

Size of database
Estimated transactions per day
Number of users
Size of company (employees or customers)
Database converted from, if conversion
Interface used (DBI, PHP, JDBC etc...)
Other tools used (How PostgreSQL is integrated with other tools to create
applications.)

Users should have a way to update this info as their database evolves. For
instance, we *hope* to add at least 1 Gbyte and many users each month, so we
look pretty insignificant now, but it should be an impressive database soon.
Unfortunately, when we added our first monthly chunk of data, I couldn't
update our info in the gallery to reflect that success.

-Nick

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Nick Fankhauser

nickf@doxpop.com Phone 1.765.965.7363 Fax 1.765.962.9788
doxpop - Court records at your fingertips - http://www.doxpop.com/

I often enjoy reading about software development on the O'Reilly Network
(http://www.oreillynet.com). One of their primary sub-sites is OnLAMP
(http://www.onlamp.com/) where LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL
Perl|Python|PHP. This is a collection of war story and how-to articles for
those technologies. This is a pretty high profile site. If you really want
more and better press then this is the sort of exposure that you need.
Someone that has good pull in the PostgreSQL community (Bruce? Tom?) should
be talking with Tim O'Reilly to get him to sponsor a similar site for
Postgres.

FWIW I sent an email to the "Ask Tim" link asking about getting that sort of
exposure and volunteering my time to make it happen but I never heard back.
I don't think that I rate a blip on his RADAR but I'm sure that someone with
a good name could make some in-roads. Have your people call his people to
schedule a con-call over a nice latte or something.

rjsjr

I think you have to give MySQL it's due.
1. It seems to have gotten into a lot of ISPs very early. I first started to
use sql when I had to had some DB driven functions to my companies website.
We where using netware at the time so a real DB server was out of the
question. I wonder how many other people got there first taste of SQL using
MySQL, perl DBI, and or PHP?
2. It works for a lot of things. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
3. There is a company behind it.

What I wish is that some company would get behind PostgreSQL and start
pushing it. It will not be IBM. They have DB2. I thought RedHat was supposed
to be getting into the DB market using Postgres.

http://r.hotwired.com/r/wn_html_link/http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,
53006,00.html

MySQL a dangerous competitor to Oracle...

Guys we need a marketing department!!! Or I'll just move the application
running my nulcear power station to MySQL...

I think a big bonus for postgres would be more and better FAQ's. Several
issues that I have run into trying to transition myself and my developers
from MSSQL and MySQL have only been resolved through hours of usenet
searches (at least until I subscribed to the pgsql-general system.)

I admit that I may just not know where to find all of the good dirt on
postgres, but that is a large part of the problem.

Some good questions that I have dealt with since starting postgres:

when I run a query comparing a float8 > 3343432, why will it not use the
index. The best answer I found is that I have to quote the number (leaving
it unquoted the parser complains about some float8 compirson not defined.).

case sensitive searches. I have seen the FAQ on this, but for my developers
this has been hard to swallow. It has even caused me a great deal of
headaches (i need a like search for address, city and state in case
insensitive, but to date just deal with only using a UCASE(state) index -- a
little on the slow side). This would be useful to have stronger comparisons
against other leading db's (i have heard that oracle suffers this problem as
well.)

This being said, i personally think that postgres is a VERY powerful
database solution that I enjoy using.

One site, that is a start at least is...
http://www.designmagick.com I don't know how much exposure he has, but
some of the tutorials haven been helpful and at least he seems to be
open to anyone with experience posting articles, code, and so forth.

Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert J. Sanford, Jr. [mailto:rsanford@trefs.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 1:45 PM
To: postgres list
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] read this and puke

I often enjoy reading about software development on the O'Reilly Network
(http://www.oreillynet.com). One of their primary sub-sites is OnLAMP
(http://www.onlamp.com/) where LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL
Perl|Python|PHP. This is a collection of war story and how-to articles for
those technologies. This is a pretty high profile site. If you really want
more and better press then this is the sort of exposure that you need.
Someone that has good pull in the PostgreSQL community (Bruce? Tom?) should
be talking with Tim O'Reilly to get him to sponsor a similar site for
Postgres.

FWIW I sent an email to the "Ask Tim" link asking about getting that sort of
exposure and volunteering my time to make it happen but I never heard back.
I don't think that I rate a blip on his RADAR but I'm sure that someone with
a good name could make some in-roads. Have your people call his people to
schedule a con-call over a nice latte or something.

rjsjr

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org]On Behalf Of Philip Hallstrom
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 2:43 PM
To: Bruce Momjian
Cc: tony; postgres list
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] read this and puke

tony wrote:

http://r.hotwired.com/r/wn_html_link/http://www.wired.com/news/lin
ux/0,1411,53006,00.html

MySQL a dangerous competitor to Oracle...

While I think we all would agree that PostgreSQL is a better database, I
liked the article. As long as it's an open-source-db vs. commercial-db I
don't think PostgreSQL can lose. Sure, that article will get people
looking at MySQL and for some (probably most) people MySQL will do
everything they want... but for some it won't and they'll wonder if
there's something else out there and find PostgreSQL. That's what
happened to me...

I started with mssql, then *had* to use Oracle because of another apps
requirement, then used mySQL for some intranet stuff (didn't want to pay
for another oracle license for starters). I didn't start using PostgreSQL
until I decided i really wanted views, triggers, foreign-keys, etc.. I
still use both depending on the client (and where it's going to be
hosted). I prefer PostgreSQL, but for some things it's overkill..

Guys we need a marketing department!!! Or I'll just move the

application

running my nuclear power station to MySQL...

You might also ask if you'd switch your power plant to PostgreSQL :) I
don't think I would only because of some of Tom Lane's comments regarding
PostgreSQL's appropriateness for mission critical 24/7 environments...
I'm also not saying that Oracle would be better either... I prefer to
leave nuclear power plants to Homer Simpson :)

Anyway, you are right. We need such highly visible sites to help
continue our user growth. It isn't required, but it clearly helps. We

One thing that PHP (well Zend) does that I think is pretty useful is to
have a nice case study section. For example this link about the navy
using PHP. I send that to a lot of people when they start wavering about
using PHP...

http://www.zend.com/zend/cs/csnavalready.php

Granted it means that we need to find people that are using PostgreSQL and
find someone to write about it as well, but this sort of thing is pretty
useful. Heck the whole "Community" section on zend.com is pretty nice.

I'm up for helping with website stuff (development wise) ... don't know
that I have much to offer article/case-study wise though...

-philip

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Hi everybody

Last week there was the LinuxTag in Germany, the biggest Linux-event
in Europe. About PostgreSQL there was one lecture held by Michael
Meskes. At his booth there was one poster with the blue elephant, that
was all about PostgreSQL at the LinuxTag;-(

For contrast: MySQL had a own booth (the second year) and several
MySQL-developers were there all the four days long.

So, I think, the presence at such a event is also a way to bring
PostgreSQL to the people.

Regards
Conni

Cornelia Boenigk wrote:

Hi everybody

Last week there was the LinuxTag in Germany, the biggest Linux-event
in Europe. About PostgreSQL there was one lecture held by Michael
Meskes. At his booth there was one poster with the blue elephant, that
was all about PostgreSQL at the LinuxTag;-(

For contrast: MySQL had a own booth (the second year) and several
MySQL-developers were there all the four days long.

So, I think, the presence at such a event is also a way to bring
PostgreSQL to the people.

Yes, I miss going those these events. With the dot-bomb, it is getting
harder and harder to attend these.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Last week there was the LinuxTag in Germany, the biggest Linux-event
in Europe. About PostgreSQL there was one lecture held by Michael
Meskes. At his booth there was one poster with the blue elephant, that
was all about PostgreSQL at the LinuxTag;-(

For contrast: MySQL had a own booth (the second year) and several
MySQL-developers were there all the four days long.

So, I think, the presence at such a event is also a way to bring
PostgreSQL to the people.

Yes, I miss going those these events. With the dot-bomb, it is getting
harder and harder to attend these.

Greatbridge [remember them? :)] had a great booth when I attended the
O'Reilly Open Source conference last year. They has pretty much the same
booth as mySQL and they had shirts/CD's etc. Bruce was even there :)

The whole mySQL/pgsql debate bores me stupid, but let's not forget that
mySQL is the *database*, the mySQL that has all the booths etc is 'mySQL AB'
which is a *company*. The closest analog to the mySQL the company
'PostgreSQL Inc' but they merely offer commercial support etc.

If you read the histtory of mySQL you'll know that mySQL was essentially a
company first (TcX Datakonsult AB) while postgreSQL has essentiually
remained in the academic/open source environment. Remember also that it
wasn't that long ago the mySQL was GPL'ed. It's all in the history :)

Cheers,
Graeme

Along the same vein, I came across this notice (in the dead tree version)
just a few days ago, else I would have mentioned it earlier:
http://www.samag.com/ed/call.htm (the october 2002 edition is about
databases).

-ron

-----Original Message-----
From: Cornelia Boenigk [mailto:poppcorn@cornelia-boenigk.de]
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 4:41 PM
To: postgres list
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] read this and puke

Hi everybody

Last week there was the LinuxTag in Germany, the biggest Linux-event
in Europe. About PostgreSQL there was one lecture held by Michael
Meskes. At his booth there was one poster with the blue elephant, that
was all about PostgreSQL at the LinuxTag;-(

For contrast: MySQL had a own booth (the second year) and several
MySQL-developers were there all the four days long.

So, I think, the presence at such a event is also a way to bring
PostgreSQL to the people.

Regards
Conni

---------------------------(end of
broadcast)---------------------------
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http://archives.postgresql.org

Graeme Merrall sez:
[...]
} Greatbridge [remember them? :)] had a great booth when I attended the
} O'Reilly Open Source conference last year. They has pretty much the same
} booth as mySQL and they had shirts/CD's etc. Bruce was even there :)

Isn't RedHat the primary commercial entity pushing PostgreSQL these days?
See http://www.redhat.com/software/database/

} The whole mySQL/pgsql debate bores me stupid, but let's not forget that
} mySQL is the *database*, the mySQL that has all the booths etc is 'mySQL
} AB' which is a *company*. The closest analog to the mySQL the company
} 'PostgreSQL Inc' but they merely offer commercial support etc.

Did anyone notice if RedHat was visibly pushing their database product, or
the PostgreSQL name?

} If you read the histtory of mySQL you'll know that mySQL was essentially
} a company first (TcX Datakonsult AB) while postgreSQL has essentiually
} remained in the academic/open source environment. Remember also that it
} wasn't that long ago the mySQL was GPL'ed. It's all in the history :)

What license is PostgreSQL, anyway? I never did find out when I was looking
for it.

} Cheers,
} Graeme
--Greg

Hi Ron,

SysAdmin Magazine. :-(

Subscribed to them a few years ago, they sent me one issue, billed my CC
for a year worth of issues, and I never received any more issues.

Then they had the gall to send threatening legal-type snail mail,
demanding I pay again for some reason, and never returned any of my
emails. Thought they were a scam which I'd somehow been sucked into,
and promptly ignored them from then on.

Hope your experiences with them have been better.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Ron Snyder wrote:

Along the same vein, I came across this notice (in the dead tree version)
just a few days ago, else I would have mentioned it earlier:
http://www.samag.com/ed/call.htm (the october 2002 edition is about
databases).

-ron

-----Original Message-----
From: Cornelia Boenigk [mailto:poppcorn@cornelia-boenigk.de]
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 4:41 PM
To: postgres list
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] read this and puke

Hi everybody

Last week there was the LinuxTag in Germany, the biggest Linux-event
in Europe. About PostgreSQL there was one lecture held by Michael
Meskes. At his booth there was one poster with the blue elephant, that
was all about PostgreSQL at the LinuxTag;-(

For contrast: MySQL had a own booth (the second year) and several
MySQL-developers were there all the four days long.

So, I think, the presence at such a event is also a way to bring
PostgreSQL to the people.

Regards
Conni

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broadcast)---------------------------
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http://archives.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

On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 21:22, Bruce Momjian wrote:

I have to read any email with that subject line. :-)

Well for the world at large there is one, and only one, free SQL
database IMO. Guess which was the first one I looked at when I
discovered I needed to learn SQL? Then I looked at the licence and I
couldn't use it without paying for it so I checked out PostgreSQL...

From various mails I have been receiving an important part of lost users
checked out PostgreSQL a couple of years ago. They weren't impressed by
the speed. We also need a campaign along the lines of "come back, we got
speed"...

RedHat can not push its version of PostgreSQL and stay friends with
Larry who gives them lots of money. So we can't count on them being a
motor behind a marketing effort.

You all know why we need more visibility? Because it becomes easier to
propose a PostgreSQL solution to clients! Ever had the CIO asking "why
don't we use MySQL? That seems to be a very poular database"?...

Maybe we could do a campaogn on "putting the P back into LAPP"? (Linux,
Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL)

I think that we should emphasize "high-end" and "powerful" as we are
looking for capturing the elite user aren't we?

Enough fluff for today

Cheers

Tony

--
RedHat Linux on Sony Vaio C1XD/S
http://www.animaproductions.com/linux2.html
Macromedia UltraDev with PostgreSQL
http://www.animaproductions.com/ultra.html

On 14 Jun 2002, tony wrote:

Maybe we could do a campaogn on "putting the P back into LAPP"? (Linux,
Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL)

"LAMP" is just one of those stupid things that happens on the open
source world: one product becomes "the one" and everything else
gets ignored. Linux got it in operating systems, perl got it in
scripting languages, MySQL in databases, and so on. The biggest
problem with this is not that I care so much what others use, but,
as you pointed out, people tend to ask for just the one thing. As
a NetBSD developer, I've been dealing with this sort of problem
for years, and I don't really see any way of overcoming it....

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC

Le Jeudi 13 Juin 2002 21:59, Justin Clift a écrit :

Along these lines, does anyone want to setup and run
jobs.postgresql.org?

I am interested.
Jean-Michel POURE

On Fri, 2002-06-14 at 07:31, Gregory Seidman wrote:

Isn't RedHat the primary commercial entity pushing PostgreSQL these days?
See http://www.redhat.com/software/database/

$2000? Ok, isn't much when you compare to Oracle, but I wonder...

Installing Debian+postgres get's me quite everything rh db is offering,
except the phone support. And once the support problems go beyond basic
things, I'm not sure RH is willing to answer them, a service contract
with one of the pg support companies will probably give a better roi?

cheers
-- vbi

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