Re: PostgreSQL in Brazil

    Hi Elein,

elein wrote:
> Here is a story.  There is a company in Brazil with about 20,000
> clients all over Brazil.  They made a decision to move from BTrieve
> to PostgreSQL.  BTrieve had been supplied by DBExperts.  After a
> sales pitch to by the owner of DBExperts, the board of directors,
> have made a subsequent decision to move to Pervasive.SQL.
> ...
> As we know, PostgreSQL is big in Brazil.  It is likely DbExperts
> is shooting themselves in the foot.
> ...
> This is the kind of thing we should know about.  I'm not sure
> we could provide enough fodder to override the salespitch
> in a particular case since that pretty much has to be an inside job.

    As far as I know, dbExperts' owner has another company (older than
dbEx) that has supported BTrieve for a long time, and now they continue
as resellers/solution providers of Pervasive. Once I talked with someone
that works/worked at dbExperts. No doubt that they try to deploy
postgresql where they can. However, I think that in this case they would
make more money selling Pervasive.
    Another important point is that this company that you're saying
probably has used BTrieve for a long time. For big companies,
consolidation matters a lot (even if they have to deploy poor software).
Maybe they chose Pervasive just because it's the "next generation
btrieve", and they think that by using it they could keep their systems
"almost as they were".
    IMHO, to a certain point, the executive that made this decision is
right, at least he considering himself: If something went wrong and he
had no one to blame, then he would be fired, mainly if he could have
chosen the "next-generation" of a solution already deployed and proven.
Of course, if it was me, I'd pick PostgreSQL without thinking twice, but
considering that decision-makers usually don't known much about the
products they're buying, I don't think this is absurd. Also, their staff
could possibly be reluctant to learn/adopt different systems than the
ones they're used to. In my last job, I had a lot of trouble with this.
    Surprisingly enough, these executives/staff people sometimes don't
achieve IT consolidation :-)

    []s
    Ricardo.