Re: How can we make beta testing better?

From: "Josh Berkus" <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>
> How can we make beta testing better and more effective? How can we get
> more users to actually throw serious workloads at new versions and share
> the results?
>
> I've tried a couple of things over the last two years and they haven't
> worked all that well. Since we're about to go into another beta testing
> period, we need something new. Ideas?

I've had a look at the mail for 9.3 beta 1:

http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/517C64F4.6000006@agliodbs.com

Please excuse me for my misunderstanding and cheekiness. I feel the
followings may need to be addressed:

* Existing and (more importantly) new users don't know about the beta
release.
I remember I saw the news about new features of MySQL on the daily mail news
of some famous IT media, such as IDG's Computerworld, Infoworld, and
Japanese IT industry news media. On the other hand, I'm afraid I hadn't see
news about new features of PostgreSQL until its final release was out. Is
subscribing to pgsql-announce the only way to know the beta release?

* Existing users are satisfied with the version they are using for their
current use cases, so they don't have motivation to try a new release.
To increase the use cases of existing users and get more users, more
attractive features may be necessary such as in-memory database, columnar
database, MPP for scaleout, database compression, integration with Hadoop,
multi-tenant database, Oracle compatibility (this should be very important
to get many users in practice), etc. I think eye-catching features like
streaming replication and materialized views are necessary to widen
PostgreSQL use.

* Explain new features by associating them with the new trends like cloud,
mobile, social, big data.

Regards
MauMau