Re: have you seen this?

Hi!

Robert Treat wrote:
>>http://det-dbalice.if.pw.edu.pl/det-dbalice/ttraczyk/db_compare/db_compare.html
>
> Interesting write-up, too bad it is so out of date. Near as I can figure
> this seems to be discussing postgresql 7.0, maybe 7.1 ?
>
> Course would be a good starting point for a "grand database feature
> comparison" that folks have often talked about writing up.

While feature comparisons may work with people migrating from commercial
RDBMSs, as they'll consider the feature/price ratio, this does not quite
work with MySQL crowd.

I was recently giving a small presentation on PostgreSQL on a Russian
PHP conference and found out an interesting thing: no one there really
cared about feature comparisons. I did a table with PostgreSQL features
and the versions they appeared in. This did not go completely unnoticed,
as the next lecture was about the new features of MySQL 4.1/5.0, but the
people were not really interested and didn't ask questions.

What's more interesting, no one really cared about PL/PHP as well.

The meta-questions asked were:
1) The main *drawbacks* of PostgreSQL;
2) When does one need to use PostgreSQL;
3) The performance question.

As the PostgreSQL advocacy group thinks that PHP programmers are among
their *main* target audience, may I humbly suggest answering the
questions that are asked instead of the ones that are not?

The most successful (most quoted) advocacy articles I remember were the
once from OpenACS (Why not MySQL?) and sql-info.de (MySQL gotchas). To
make people look at PostgreSQL you should concentrate on why MySQL is
*bad*, to create a sense of insecurity in its users. That is the
propaganda that works.