Re: systems 2007 ...

[Robert Gravsjö <robert ( at ) blogg ( dot ) se>]

Hans-Juergen Schoenig wrote:
> 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?"

This is pretty interesting, anyone else had similar experience? Is the 
main concern comparision with MySQL on one hand and Oracle on the other?

> 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.

Did you get any counter argument? Were there any objections?

> 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.

Thank you for sharing the experience, I found it most interesting.

/roppert

>     cheers,
>
>         hans
>
>
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