Re: Rejecting weak passwords

On 10/15/2009 01:44 PM, Dave Page wrote:
> I don't deal with prospective clients, which is where this comes from.
> I do deal with a team of (pre)sales engineers who complain about this,
> and maybe half-a-dozen other issues on a very regular basis. They tell
> me that PostgreSQL loses out in early stages of tech evals because of
> this issue, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. Sure it's almost
> certainly not the only reason, but they add up.
>

A lot of evaluations are designed to fit exactly one product, and it's
impossible to win here.

In my own company, I recently saw the most ridiculous (to me)
evaluations over a suite of products, that effectively listed an exact
implementation as requirements. This resulted in a huge split between
people who considered the evaluation fair and who went with their choice
for exactly that one product, and the rest of the people who called the
evaluation a sham and refused to participate, choosing to instead use
their own choice of products not caring about the outcome of the
evaluation. The evaluation, by the way, included other "silly"
statements, like how a database instance costs $48k in license fees,
even though everybody knew we were already using PostgreSQL for $0k or
even if we chose to be supported by one of the many PostgreSQL support
companies, it would not cost $48k. Where did they get that number?
Because they presumed they would go with Oracle. The evaluation was a
sham from start to finish.

Perhaps you can see how little I value some arbitrary checkbox list on
some "evaluation"? If people want to count PostgreSQL off the list from
the start - they will, and there is not much you or I can do about it.
Bowing to the pressure of fulfilling these checkboxes, when they'll just
change them next time to something else that PostgreSQL doesn't quite
do, is a waste of time.

We should do what is right to do. We should not be focusing on
checkboxes raised by other people who are not competent enough to
understand the subject matter or who have already made their choice, and
the evaluation is just a rubber stamp to pretend they have done due
diligence about justifying their choice compared to alternatives.

Cheers,
mark

--
Mark Mielke<mark(at)mielke(dot)cc>