Re: Certification Available +Pronounce

Sorry, September was bad for lists in this part of the world.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:39:00AM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 August 2005 13:46, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> > software doesn't suck (when they use it wrong). My boss was just
> > yesterday telling me of a case he recently heard of in this vein:
> > some folks he knows couldn't make Postgres work, so they went and
> > used something else. They believe you Can't Do That With Postgres,
> > even though what they really should have concluded is probably one of
> > Don't Do That or you Can't Do That With Those Staff.
> >
>
> This anecdote seems to contradict itself since there *are* a lot of services
> companies running around (which I am guessing they didn't try to make use
> of).

Right. Because when they ran into trouble, they couldn't go to
The Vendor. When you're dealing with that mindset, you run into some
trouble.

> The other question is does having a lot of well trained people in the
> market get people to use PostgreSQL? At some point it would, but I don't
> think it does now.

This is true; although the converse is certainly a bigger deal (not
having people available makes potential adopters go elsewhere). A
couple years ago, I decided not to take a job out in the suburbs
(because I didn't want to drive), and so the people used MySQL
instead of Postgres.

> your example. I bet we'd be better off with a "certified postgresql user"
> setup where people can easily get certified as long as they know the basics
> of postgresql (command line tools, 10 most important conf settings,
> familiarity with some anciallry tools like slony, pgadmin, ppa, pqa or some
> such). Basically I'm not sure we've conquerued the "we don't use postgres
> cause nobody uses it" excuse, and a simple certification might help do that.

There's something to this, but if I had a nickel for every "stupid
certified guy didn't know anything" story I've heard, I'd be able to
retire and set up a Postgres support company.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan | ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca
A certain description of men are for getting out of debt, yet are
against all taxes for raising money to pay it off.
--Alexander Hamilton