Re: Feedback from LinuxWorld, London

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 03:07:26PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> The biggest issues are:
> 1, 2, 3, and 4) Lack of information, e.g. no "PostgreSQL for MySQL users"
> handbook.
> 5) Flakyness of data migration tools, which are largely unmaintained these
> days;
> 6) Lack of data abstraction in many OSS apps (this we can't fix).

As I suggested in another mail in this thread, I suspect that 6 is
actually item 0 here.

I've mentioned before the conversations I've had in the halls and at
the booth at OSCON, but I'll say it again: I've had a lot of "power"
MySQL users tell me, "Why would I move to Postgres?  MySQL has
everything I need; the licenses are cheap; and, when I _really_ need
big iron, I go get Oracle, because the clients will pay anyway, since
they're buying expensive hardware."

I think MySQL is indeed perceived by some as "our competition",
because they have two classes: "Open source databases" and "Real
databases."  In my opinion, the MySQL space isn't interesting: most
of the systems are not really database-backed systems at all, but are
systems that sort of look databasey.  When you look at the code,
there are all sorts of horrible things that no-one familiar with
normalisation or constraints would ever do; but that's what
inexperience has bred.  And the truth is that those applications are
_always_ going to have pain when they need to migrate to a real
system, because the problem isn't the storage engine or the lack of
ACID or anything like that, but the total absense of a real data
model.

So we need to focus on moving out to the "Open source databases"
category and into the "Real databases" category.  One way to do this,
of course, is to tell people that if they only think they need MySQL,
they should go there; we're really for people who need a system like
Oracle or DB2, except that we're free.  If enough people believe
that, new projects who would have used MySQL will use Postgres
instead.

A

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Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
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