Report from MYGOSSCON

Hi all;

First, I am very happy to report that PostgreSQL is very much alive
and well in Malaysia. My booth was two booths down from a booth
rented by the Abyres Group and staffed by both Abyres and EnterpriseDB
employees. There were several other EnterpriseDB resellers there. In
general, including EDB resellers (and on the other side those
advertising MySQL expertise), PostgreSQL had a stronger showing than
did Oracle/MySQL, even accounting for the size of the cube.

After advocating PostgreSQL and the PostgreSQL community more or less
non-stop for 2 days, my opinion of PostgreSQL as an RDBMS has only
risen. Being able to explain why in many OLTP environments it is
better than Oracle (Transactional DDL, easy partial unique indexes,
some of the contrib mods), and the quality of the questions that
people asked were excellent, I thought.

All told we distributed 90 copies of the "What Is PostgreSQL?" flier,
50 copies of the PG Mag article "PostgreSQL at CNAF: 1 Billion SQL
Queries per Day," and an unknown number of LedgerSMB fliers. Most of
these materials were given to public sector employees. We got to hear
success stories from within the Malaysian government, and I came away
with a great deal of excitement. Or maybe I just drank too much
caffeine ;-) Yes, free tea and coffee right in front of our booth is
a dangerous thing.

The entire region of South-East Asia seems to be looking more and more
towards Free/Open Source Software and PostgreSQL is very attractive
to everyone because it is the primary alternative to Oracle in OLTP
environments.

And so some questions I got that I was entirely unprepared to answer:

1) Contact points for internships?
2) How well translated are the PostgreSQL messages in Arabic?
3) How does PG compare to Sybase?
4) PostgreSQL certifications in Asia: Anyone offering them?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers