Re: PostgreSQL certifications?

In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, erempel(at)uvic(dot)ca (Evan Rempel) transmitted:
> I disagree with the supply demand argument.
>
> I just went through a 100+ hour evaluation of 4 database products for
> selection in an enterprise environment. Approx 200 databases for a total
> of 11+GB of data with 4,500 users accross 110 departments. A substantial
> undertaking.
>
> One of the criteria was "Can our DBA team get formal
> training/certification to support the selected product in our
> environment?"
>
> Without this, the organization is reluctant to even consider rolling
> PostgreSQL our in a production environment, regardless of who thinks
> it's good, how much it costs or any other technical reason. The IT
> staff never gets an oportunity to showcase PostgreSQL because it is
> never put into production. If it's never in production, there is
> never a job oportunity, and without the job oportunity, the
> PostgreSQL community never create training/certification. This is an
> endless circle.

Does your organization require a "certification program" for every
piece of software they install?

-> Are you required to be a ViCP? (Vi-Certified Programmer)

-> How about GCC certification?

-> Remarkably enough, despite the absence of a certification
program, Apache has proven very popular, indeed, more popular
than IIS, which also lacks a certification program.

-> Are any of your people BASH-certified? How about their Ksh
certification? (I am quite sure that nobody is
COMMAND.COM-certified.)

In the absence of these certifications, it would be just stupid for
organizations to adopt any of these tools, as it would demonstrably
impossible for them to be supportable in said absence.

I'm being a little sarcastic here, but it sure seems odd that those
pieces of software have grown so popular despite the complete absence
of relevant certifications if certifications were truly so important.

Reality is that putting together certification programs is a sizable,
bureaucratically-challenging sort of task that _isn't_ something that
Tom Lane or Bruce Momjian should drop development work to work on.

Whatever the would-be demand, it has not been of a nature that has
drawn anyone out of the woodwork to do it. I think the PostgreSQL Inc
guys out in Nova Scotia had _something_ happening a year or so ago,
but it evidently wasn't something that could turn into obvious
advocacy efforts.

The fact that you think you need it does not magically result in other
people concluding that it becomes their responsibility to provide it;
that's the way open source communities work...
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