Re: [ANNOUNCE] Postgres Success Stories

> Greetings All,
>
> Do you use PostgreSQL ?

I personally don't, but the site I put together at Argonne Lab
consistently draws hundreds of users a day, despite its rudimentary
interface and almost absent documentation. That's quite a number,
considering how specialized the database is:

http://wit.mcs.anl.gov/EMP/

This site has also been cloned dozens of times.

It's a database with almost no schema that is mainly used for
retrieval. it consists of a number of simple index tables; the relations
are formed on the fly by queries. It may, however, be of interest to
the more general audience because it uses extended data types.

> Do you love it ?

I sympathize.

> Do you want the world to know ?

Yes. First, because I owe most of my success to the original and
current postgres developers, as well as to the members of the
list.

Also, because I am worried about the future of my work. The
development of custom types and access methods is definitely not in
the focus of the popular demand. In the meanwhile, the needs of
science are not completely satisfied. We still need a true floating
point type that can represent ranges of values, which is required to
store the results of measurements in a reasonable way. My own type,
http://wit.mcs.anl.gov/EMP/seg-type.html, http://wit.mcs.anl.gov/EMP/seg-type.tgz,
is just a successful attempt, and it needs to be further developed and
kept in sync with the postgres code, for which I do not have time
anymore. I would really love someone to pick it up. I would even argue
that such a type is important enough to be one of the core types in
postgres. That would allow it to fill the scientific niche as well,
where I guess it hasn't so far had any competition at all.

--Gene