Re: What popular, large commercial websites run PostgreSQL?

Fran Fabrizio <ffabrizio(at)mmrd(dot)com> writes:
> I also found the tinyest of blurbs that intimated that Verizon Wireless
> used Pg on a project and presented a talk about it at an open source
> database conference in the fall, but I was unable to find any followup
> information.

They were supposed to present a talk about it :-(. Last year's OSDB
conference was late September, and a number of people didn't show
because they were afraid to fly after 9/11. Including Verizon's man.
I was disappointed because I really wanted to hear about it ... but IIRC
they are using Pg to run a text-messaging service of some kind.

The largest-scale Pg project that I can recall hearing about is that
the American Chemical Society is stuffing page images of their entire
library (150 years' worth of journals) into a database. Terabytes.
You can find something about it in our mailing list archives.

> That's not much and didn't go very far in exciting my management but
> that's all I could come up with. It's quite possible that either it's
> not being used by many large commercial corporations (at least in the
> US) or that those corporations are not going to admit that for whatever
> stigma they feel is associated with using open source software.

I think people tend to look at it as unexciting infrastructure. Do
corporations make a point of telling you what hardware they run their
websites on? What OS? What webserver software? As a rule not (in
fact, a reasonably paranoid sysadmin would make a point of *not* giving
out that info, in case some cracker knows about vulnerabilities in those
particular systems). The database is unlikely to be any different.
There might be lots of Pg-backed websites out there, but we have no good
way to know.

regards, tom lane