Re: Is there a shortage of postgresql skilled ops people

On 3/27/07, Marc Evans <Marc@softwarehackery.com> wrote:

Hello -

Over the past couple of years I have made use of postgresql as my database

of choice when developing new software. During that time, my clients have

in multiple cases eventually come back to me and requested a re-targeting

to "Any database that we (my client) can find skilled ops staff to

support." In a most recent case, professional recruiters were employed to

try to find such people. The search was disappointing at best.

My question for this community is, what do enterprises that you deploy

postgresql within do for skilled operations staffing? I can understand

trying to convert a mysql or Oracle person to work on postgresql, but it

would be very helpful to have a potential talent pool to draw from that

was similar to those others. Finding people with HA, scaling and

performance tuning knowledge is something that seems impossible to find

except in people wanting to be developers.

The sad reality from what I have observed is that unless more people gain

those skills and want to work in ops, it's becoming very hard for me to

justify recommending postgresql for enterprise (or larger) scale projects.

What do others  do and/or experience?

PostgreSQL talent is in high demand.  From perspective of

maintainability, this is probably the only drawback (but a serious

one) to choose it as a platform to run a company on.  There is, IMO, a

good reason for this...pg people tend to be very good and tend to stay

employed...

If I was in your position, I would suggest contracting is the best way

to go for those companies, either through yourself (the obvious

choice), or hook them up with some of the bigger names in the

postgresql community, command prompt, agliodbs, etc.