Re: [GENERAL] Re: [HACKERS] [Fwd: SGVLLUG Oracle and Informix on Linux]

maillist@candle.pha.pa.us (Bruce Momjian) writes:

| Consider what we are doing.  Commercial database vendors have teams of
| full-time programmers, adding features to their databases, while we have a
| volunteer group of part-time developers.

Oh!  I'd never *dream* of maligning the coders working on PostgreSQL.  For a
volunteer grass-roots effort, PostgreSQL is a paragon of virtue---one of the
reasons I like it.  And writing complex database packages of this sort isn't
exactly chimp-stuff, either---I think any of us would vouch for that.

Ultimately, the crux of the matter is this:  who are we *targeting* as our
competition?  If we're looking at the mSQL and mySQL camp, clearly PostgreSQL
stomps them both, from both the SQL support side and the data-security side.
(And yes, I'd agree that the code is *ever* so much neater than MySQL.)

But if we're trying to position ourselves as a viable alternative to the big
commercial ones, such as Oracle and Informix and Sybase and MS SQL Server, we
need to work on a lot of issues.  Open source is perceived in the business
community as a big risk, and not a benefit.  Even today, someone said to me,
"Oh, that's all we need, some Linux guru spending three or four hours on
compiling a new kernel rather than attending to his actual duties."  (Yes, I'll
be the first to admit that it was a stupid statement, but as a consultant, I
can't just say, "What a stupid statement."  It takes time to win over people
like this; you have to throw a product at them that makes them go, "Geez, that
was cool, and it saved us a lot of time and money.")

| Fortunately, we have many features they don't have, which we inherited from
| Berkeley.

Yes.  But at the moment, they have a bunch of *fundamental* features that we
don't have.  That's what worries me as far as general acceptance of PostgreSQL
by the business community.

| I have made it a personal project of mine to make it clear, so other people
| can understand it and hence contribute.

A lot more could be done.  More comments.  Breaking out individual datatypes
into their own modules (ready-made templates for new types that require
implementation in C!).  But to your (and others') credit, it's gotten quite a
bit cleaner just in the last year.

| We clearly are the most advanced "open source" database around.  We now
| have "closed source" competition.  How do we meet that challenge?

If we can clear up some of the glaring lackings in PostgreSQL by year-end, I
think it'll've been met pretty well.