Draft #7: yet more dramatic changes

Folks,

Here's Yet Another Draft Of The Press Release (YADOTPR). This one is pretty
dramatically different, so let me explain the thinking behind it before you
critique.

WARNING: I am leaving town this weekend until September 2. So I plan to wrap
up the release by this Friday.

Wade Klaver of Wavefire had some very good suggestions over IRC. He suggested
that I cut the press release down to 5-7 paragraphs, and then use all of the
material we've generated for our "4-page" version of the release as the basis
for the 7.4 release web page. So you will notice that the release below
has a *lot* less material. Hopefully that means it's more likely to be
read.

I will be posting a draft of the 7.4 reference web page tommorrow.

Currently, the quotes go in this order: Rod, Lamar, and Afilias. The reason
I put Afilias last is becuase we quote them all the time; I don't want to
drop the quote, but I don't want to give the press the idea that Afilias is
the only PostgreSQL user, either.

Nobody has come forward and offered a better city location than Panama City
(our project no longer has any connection to Toronto). So Panama City stays.

For US contacts, I'm using me and Bruce, which gives us a nice East Coast-West
Coast division. Country contacts ( such as Devrim & Anastasios & Shridhar
and the Aussie crew) will use their own contact information.

Without further ado:
============================================

CONTACT: East Coast: Bruce Momjian
(610) 359-1001
press(at)postgresql(dot)org

West Coast: Josh Berkus
415-565-7293
press(at)postgresql(dot)org

PANAMA CITY, PANAMA: SEPTEMBER ##, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) is pleased to announce the
availability of version 7.4 of the PostgreSQL Object Relational Database
Management System (ORDBMS). This major release is the work
of our world wide network of hundreds of developers and contributors over
the last 9 months. It provides commercial-grade enterprise database
functionality and performance with the flexibility and low total cost of
ownership widely associated with Open Source software.

"If you tried PostgreSQL before, and went with a commercial database like
Oracle or DB2 instead, it's time to re-evaluate," says Rod Taylor of Inquent
Technologies. "PostgreSQL's expanding enterprise feature set and performance
improvements over the last two years make PostgreSQL competitive with even the
highest-end database systems. And you can't beat the cost."

Version 7.4 includes a host of new features which make PostgreSQL a
more powerful and scalable database for large enterprises. These include
AMD Opteron(tm) optimization, improved index maintenence tools, and enhanced
support of full text indexing which adds ranked result sets. Combined with
the recent contribution of the eRServer(c) replication solution by PostgreSQL
Inc., these advances fulfill PostgreSQL's potential to run high-availability,
large-scale data centers.

Hash aggregation in memory, query planner improvement for subqueries, a new
wire protocol, and expanded functional and expressional indexes were also
added by the PGDG. These features will improve query and procedure
performance for all size databases, in some cases by as much as 400%,
The new version maintains PostgreSQL's status as one of the fastest SQL
databases in the world.

Lamar Owen, Director of Information Technology for the Pisgah Astronomical
Research Institute, commented on the new features, "The improved performance
of PostgreSQL 7.4 for very large, data-warehouse tables will allow me to
provide efficient access to a huge library of astronomical photography and
spectrography, correlated with geological and meteorlogical observations, over
the Internet. The improved indexing capabilities for custom and composite
types will allow unprecedented ease in analyzing this data, which tends to be
difficult to shoehorn into traditional index paradigms."

Facilitating the desire of database developers to migrate their projects to
PostgreSQL, 7.4 is more accessable and standardized than any previous version.
First, the PGDG has "raised the bar" on ANSI SQL standard compliance by
completely overhauling messaging internals and enhnacing metadata reporting,
creating a complete SQL standard error-reporting and information schema
framework. Second, the online documentation has been extensively reorganized
and expanded to give new PostgreSQL users an easier start. Third, to make
things even easier for users accustomed to a graphical environment, two of
most popular GUI administration tools for PostgreSQL, pgAdmin and phgPGAdmin
are releasing dramatically revised new versions to accompany PostgreSQL 7.4.

"We have used PostgreSQL successfully for over two years in a
mission-critical capacity to support our registry systems," said Ram Mohan,
Chief Technology Officer for Afilias Limited, the company responsible for
running the backend database containing all .info and .org Internet domain
names worldwide. "This upgrade of PostgreSQL improves the scalability and
capacity of PostgreSQL and will help to ensure continued advancements to
future releases."

RELEASE DETAILS
-------------------------------------
More information on this release, including a full list of new features and
full text of all quotes, is available at:
<URL here>

About PostgreSQL:
With more than 16 years of development by hundreds of the world's
most generous and brilliant minds from the open source community,
PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database. With its
long time support of an enterprise level feature set including
transactions, stored procedures, triggers, and subqueries, PostgreSQL is
being used by many of today's most demanding businesses and government
agencies.

Corporations such as BASF, Red Hat, Afilias Limited, Cisco, Chrysler,
OpenMFG and 3Com, organizations like WGCR Radio, the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, and Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, and Open
Source projects including Bricolage, OpenACS and GForge rely on PostgreSQL's
rock solid performance record and open development process. PostgreSQL is
available under a BSD License for both commercial and non-commercial use.

To find out more about PostgreSQL or to download it, please visit:
http://www.postgresql.org/

Note to Editors: Additional information on the following companies quoted in
this release can be found at:
Inquent Technologies: http://www.inquent.com
Contact: Celal Ulgen 416-645-4600 press(at)inquent(dot)com
Afilias Limited : http://www.afilias.info/about_afilias/backgrounder
Contact: Heather Carle 215-706-5777 hcarle(at)afilias(dot)info
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute: http://www.pari.edu
Contact: Lamar Owen 828-862-5554 lowen(at)pari(dot)edu

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco