systems 2007 ...

[Hans-Juergen Schoenig <hs(at)cybertec(dot)at>]

good morning everybody,

my friend zoltan böszörmenyi (this is the guy who posted the GENERATED BY) and i spent 4 days at systems (one of the largest IT exhibitions in Europe).

it was quite successful and many people came to ask about PostgreSQL.

i would see three types of people this time:

- "what is the difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL?"

- "we use PostgreSQL; we are so happy; keep doing "

- "we use Oracle, is PostgreSQL as powerful as Oracle?"

to answer the first type of question the best strategies were: "what would happen if you lost all your data?".  in most cases this made people think about system reliability and so on - avoiding data loss is a killer argument.

a second argument is MySQL's fetish to implement new storage engines: "would you trust somebody who comes around every two years and telling you that the previous way of storing data was no good under some circumstances? personally i would prefer people who do their job once but properly" (this is a killer argument *evil grin*). people were most responsive to those arguments.

on the feature side PITR was the most interesting one. people seem to use it for failover (99% i would say).

partitioning was also a killer feature.

some people mentioned that VACUUM is an issue for them. the existence of VACUUM seems to be a reason why people did not consider looking at PostgreSQL more extensively.

we printed and spread around 700 flyers this time and i guess we convinced many people to use PostgreSQL.

i will load up some photos shortly.

cheers,

hans

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