Re: 7.4 Press Release -- starting Draft #5

Robert, PGadvocates

First of all, thanks for keeping track of all these changes! I was not
looking forward to combing through all of the last 3 days' email. Thank you.

However, I've been thinking some about the tone of the press release.
Currently, what we have is essentially the technical announcement, "dumbed
down" for the general press. While this gives us the correct content, it
lacks "punch" that will interest reporters.

Or, as Heather put it:
> please let me know. From what I've seen so far I'd suggest tightening up the
> lead and adding in the one big idea as to why 7.4 is important. Basically my
> experience has been that you need to say everything in a short and concise
> lead or the reporter doesn't even move his mouse to scroll down before
> hitting the delete button :)

As such, I think we need to re-draft the press release to put the "big news"
stuff at the top and the "unrelated" detail at the bottom. And what's our
"big news"?

Well, the combined fixes and enhancements in 7.4, perhaps for the first time,
really puts PostgreSQL's core functionality on even footing with Oracle and
DB2 for large enterprise needs. Particularly I am thinking of:
-- planner improvements for speed
-- index-FSM means that a well-tuned 7.4 database no longer has to lock any
tables ever for maintainence; true 99.99% uptime at last.
-- donation of eRServer gives us a "battle-tested" replication solution
-- read-only transaction setting improves multiuser security
-- 64 bit support including Opteron
-- new wire protocol speeds transfer of large objects

Secondary to that but also important to "punch up" are the features that make
it easier for enterprise to transition from proprietary databases:
-- error reporting re-design allows vastly improved handling of errors by
middleware for large distributed applications, especially since we use
SQL-standard error codes
-- join rewrite makes an easier transition for MS SQL & Sybase apps
-- multibyte regex broadens our international support
-- improved Tsearch exceeds MySQL's FTI and MSSQL's FTS;
and, most importantly:
-- reorganized and improved documentation makes the transition to PostgreSQL
easier than it ever has been before.

The other features/improvements, while important to our internal community,
aren't going to make sense to most reporters. Instead, we need to tell a
story -- a simple story -- which says:
"Evaluate and switch to PostgreSQL now, it will be easy and we're just as good
as the Big Guys."

Am I making any sense?

--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco