Re: PostgreSQL in the press again - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

>On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 09:28:12PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
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>>Externally, everybody thinks that there should be just one, just like
>>there is for other databases.
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>I guess it's this thing that I want to understand.  Why do people
>believe that?  Because other databases, where "other" are "the ones
>I'd actually run important systems on" _don't_ have just one.
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>A
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I don;t think it is really an issue of having just one supported
replication system.  It is a different issue that people don't really
internalize well enough to talk about.  It is, IMO, the fact that these
other systems (MS SQL, Oracle, etc) have replication systems through the
same vendor as the software itself.

Now I realize that Mommoth PostgreSQL is available from the same vendor
that offros Mommoth Replicator.  But in the eyes of the customer Mammoth
and PostgreSQL are not identical.  Therefore they are afraid of having
one vendor tell them that the problem exists with another third-party
product.  This reaction that add-ons are somewhat inferior to solutions
offered from the same source then leads people to say "PostgreSQL
doesn't have replication!"  MS SQL has at least 2 forms of replication,
PostgreSQL doesn't have any in this view.

What we need to do to counter this perception is advertise the fact that
many of these replication systems are developed by core community
members and/or developers, and some of them are quite mature.  Some,
like dbmirror, have a history of being included in the source release,
even.  We need to advertise these things.  Yes, the following projects
had involvement by members of our core team....  The following
projects/products have great commercial support....  The following
products/projects are widely used in the community....

As a community, obviously our focus will be on open source solutions,
but I have no problem with such a document pointing to commercial
products from time to time in order to show that we as a community
endorse solutions to this problem.  (Regarding commercial Win32 ports, I
am not opposed to having a "commercial ports" list available either.)
Yes, this opens a can of worms, but it solves another bigger problem
(perception by potential customers and the press).

It might not be a bad idea for a collaborative effort to be used to
write a faq solely on replication options available.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting