Re: Need for PostgreSQL demand?

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 09:39 +0100, Gabriele Bartolini wrote:

> surfing the MySQL website I ended on the JoinVision website, which
> had a few interesting diagrams regarding the skills market according to
> their job offers/applications archive.
>
> http://www.joinvision.com/jv/x/n/t-TStatMarketDetail-statistic-db-loc-en
>
> The scary thing is that there is almost a 5% of skilled people using
> PostgreSQL, but less than 1% demand by companies or employers in general.

Couple of points to consider:

- We're on the list!

- Where did all these people get those skills? If 4% of DBMS
professionals have invested time outside of their jobs to learn
PostgreSQL, then I'd call that victory. However, seems more likely that
a lot of people are using and learning PostgreSQL at work, but the
market hasn't yet hit the point where there is an open skills market for
PostgreSQL skills, so the job ads haven't yet caught up.

- There's a huge number of legacy databases to manage, produced over the
last 20-30 years. Those numbers don't tell you what I see: many DBMS are
in legacy mode and many people are replacing them with Postgres. That
takes time to achieve, but it also means that skills in the legacy
products are still highly in demand for migrations and long term
maintenance.

- The difficulty in managing Oracle increases its Total Cost of
Ownership which is making people move away from it. The requirement to
have lots of DBAs doesn't necessarily equate to a long term stable job
role for Oracle DBAs. There is a skill shift towards
Developers-with-Database-skills, so the primary job ads will mention PHP
but you'll only get the job if you know PHP and Postgres, for example.

--
Simon Riggs
2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com