Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:46 PM, Robert Haas wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:15 PM, David Fetter<david(at)fetter(dot)org>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 08:02:31PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>>>>> That is a slightly alarmist. Who are we going to lose these
>>>>> users to?
>>>
>>>> Drizzle. MySQL forks. CouchDB. Any database which has
>>>> replication which you don't need a professional DBA to understand.
>>>> Whether or not it works.
>>>
>>> You haven't explained why we'd lose such folk next year when we
>>> haven't lost them already. MySQL has had replication (or at least
>>> has checked off the bullet point ;-)) for years. I'd be seriously
>>> surprised if any of the forks will offer significantly better
>>> replication than is there now, so the competitive situation is not
>>> changing in that regard.
>>>
>>> It is true that we're missing a chance to pull some folks away while
>>> the situation on that side of the fence is so messy. But I don't
>>> see our situation getting worse because of that, just not getting
>>> better.

One possible reason that replication is more critical now than it was
a year ago is the rise in cloud computing. The ability to fire up
instances on demand is much more useful when some of those boxes can
be database servers and those databases servers can replicate the
primary database and start doing something useful. As far as I can
tell this one feature alone is the one thing that makes it hard to
convince people to migrate away from Mysql despite it's demonstrable
inferiority in many other areas. Postgres seems to be winning
mindshare as the "real" and reliable database of choice for people who
are serious about their data. But for many, many businesses (many of
whom are really not that serious about their data) easy to set up
replication is just too big of a draw, such that you can't get them to
consider anything without it.

I don't know if current postgres users are really going to switch over
existing projects that were built on postgres, but for new apps
running on EC2 or similar I would not be surprised to see people
choosing mysql over postgres solely on this one issue. Databases
scalability is becoming and issue for more and more businesses and
others are filling in the gap. If postgres could combine it's current
deserved reputation for having a robust feature set, standards
compliance, high performance, reliability, stability, etc, with easy
to use replication it would be be a slam dunk, no-brainer decision to
go with postgres on just about anything.

Just my 2 cents.

Rick

P.S. I don't actually use mysql anywhere but I know many who do and
replication is always the sticking point.