Re: [GENERAL] Is there a shortage of postgresql skilled ops people - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Marc,
I forwarded your message to pgsql-advocacy list.

The same situation in Russia ! I think, that the major problem here is
lack of "official" training courses on PostgreSQL and certificates.
"Official" mean something that was accepted by the PostgreSQL community.
This is a real pity, since we (developers) are working on adding nice
features, making porting popular software solutions to PostgreSQL easier,
but there are no certified postgresql admins available on market.
For example, I and Teodor last year participated in porting of very
popular accounting enterprize solution from MS SQL to PostgreSQL and
there are about 800,000 installations already, so in principle, we have
big market, but people needed to be educated and certified, so company
could decide to switch from MS SQL to PostgreSQL.

Probably, it's time to sponsor our book-writers and other enthusiasts
to write "PostgreSQL Administration handbook", which we (community) will
accept, support and translate to different languages. I'm willing
to contribute "Full Text Search" chapter, for example. AFAIK, we have enough
people, already wrote PostgreSQL books. I like Corry's book, for example.
I don't know how much it might costs, but I'm sure community has money for this.

As for certificates, I see no real problem. We need to design nice
certificate, translate to different languages, publish on www.postgresql and
approve a list of people, who can sign certificate. We have many members of
our community in different regions/countries, so this is not a problem.

btw, probably, this project could be a nice introducing for PostgreSQL EU.


Oleg
On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Marc Evans 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?
>
> Thanks in advance - Marc
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
>

     Regards,
         Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83