systems 2007 ...

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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