Just PR (was: Stability, PR)

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 09:35:12AM -0600, Jason Earl wrote:
> Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@fourpalms.org> writes:

> > One of the nicest things about the PostgreSQL team is the lack of FUD
> > and marketing fluff.

> > How does one prove something? By developing a history of success, not by
> > claiming it. And folks like yourself help a lot by showing success.
> >
> >                     - Thomas
>
> I couldn't agree more.  The PostgreSQL team is honest to a fault about
> the true state of the codebase.  They will happily tell you which
> parts of the code are still somewhat scary.  On the other hand, when
> they say that something is ready for prime time, you can be assured
> that it *is* ready for production use.

While I agree completely with these sentiments, it does strike me
that one of the (many) sad bits about the demise of Great Bridge was
the death of the marketing efforts that they were able to undertake.
I had a recent experience which reminded me that the full-blow
bull-pucky claims of certain "unbreakable" systems stick in the minds
of those "non-technical techies" someone was recently bemoaning.
And, like it or not, those guys make a lot of decisions.

Worse, there are a lot of _bona fide_ Old Fart techies who are just
not as plugged into the current technology as they once were.
They've been promoted (?) to mangle^H^H^Hagement, and they are asked
to make decisions that they are really no longer informed enough to
be making.  In such cases, they are likely to reach for the "safe"
bet, even if there's nothing especially safe about it.

So, a little PR goes a long way.  But a _lot_ of PR goes a much
longer way, and may make the little PR unheard.

It struck me earlier today that maybe what free RDBMS need is
something like USENIX and SAGE.  That way, there'd be a consistent
voice focussing just on the RDBMS world, pointing out the advantages
of systems like PostgreSQL.  It also struck me that there might
already be such a thing.  Is there?  And if not, is there any reason
to hope that one could get it going without having a lot of pointless
name-calling about (for instance) whether MySQL really belongs?

A

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