Re: On managerial choosing (was: Postgres VS Oracle)

On Wednesday 20 June 2007, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 11:22:17AM -0400, Chris Browne wrote:
> > In cases where you *do not* spend the BPOM, there is not any
> > particular evidence available to indicate that Oracle is, in any
> > interesting way, more reliable than PostgreSQL.
>
> I hate to say this, but as true as the above is, it has very close to
> zero relevance to the way most senior managers make decisions.

[...]

I also hate to say this, but I fully agree with whatever you wrote in this
mail.

[...]

> much money you have to spend, and how risky it would be to tie that
> up in Oracle licenses.  In some cases, that turns out to be too risky,
> and Postgres becomes a viable choice.  It's only exceptionally
> visionary senior managers who operate in other ways.

Yes, maybe 10 out of 100. Likely less.

[...]
> addicted to the excellent features of PostgreSQL, though.  The second
> is that marketing to management by using arguments, listing lots of
> technical detail and features, and the like, will never work.
> They'll ignore such cluttered and crowded brochures, because they
> don't deal in technical detail.  We have to make PostgreSQL a
> low-risk choice for them.

I wonder if this is something which really is a job of the core team or
community (I think of the 'traditional' PG users who are more technically
focussed and maybe not enthusiastic about too much CIO/CTO flavored
communication). Actually this kind of communication looks to me like to be
perfectly done by commercial PG vendors?

Anastasios