High-Profile Advocacy Opportunity: Vbulletin Forum Software

Vbulletin is a leading, high profile, forum software package and, IMHO,
the most well thought-out. It currently uses MySQL but alternatives are
being discussed in both their very active official forum
(http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/) and the main vb hacking forum
(http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/).

A Postgresql edition of vbulletin would do a lot to raise awareness of
Pgsql and highlight it's strengths. I would like to suggest that the
time is ripe to see if we can swing vbulletin into our camp.

In a recent thread in the official vb forum
(http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97747&highlight=PostgreSQL),
one Pgsql advocate sang its praises, in particular advanced indexing,
and a vb developer, Scott MacVicar, responded "I love Postgresql too but
they are missing a vital part that we've become dependant on..". He
then linked to the Pgsql ToDo list and indicated that the current lack
of " Allow INSERT INTO tab (col1, ..) VALUES (val1, ..), (val2, ..)" was
his bone of contention there.

He rounded his comment off by saying "There is alot of things that could
be used which would provide increased performance such as stored
procedures and foreign keys along with views, we'll be having alot of
discussion at our meeting next week and i'm sure that other dbms is
something that will come up."

That particular thread got quite heated and there were another 140
posts. Not all the vb developers are as enthusiastic as Scott; one
would much rather see effort directed towards an Oracle edition that
would allow them to pursue corporate customers. Another points out
that, in terms of actual customer requests, there is far more demand for
MS-SQL. The main consensus, however, seems to be that they should sit
tight and wait for the introduction of stored procedures in MySQL 5.
Personally, I'm convinced that extremely large forums are going become
even more important over the next year or so and, for an extremely large
forum you need an extremely capable db. I believe that vb should bite
the bullet and make the necessary jump.

The most compelling argument for Pgsql may, however, be its license:
another thread points out that vbulletin is technically in breach of
MySQL AB's license
(http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing/commercial-license.html). Vb
dev Scott responded "If we receive a letter from MySQL AB telling us
other wise then we'll reconsider our position". Seems like a pretty
shaky foundation for any company to build their one and only product
upon!

Is there any way we could get the Pgsql devs to take another look at
whatever missing features are stopping the vb team basing their
application upon Pgsql? The problem with the ToDo list is that,
although it was updated just a couple of days ago, there is no
indication or estimate of when those ToDos will be Done.

Donnacha