Re: Forrester: Ingres and MySQL Lead Open Source Databases

Greg Stark wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Josh Berkus<josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> So in the case of analysts, it's a case of "can we influence this
>> analyst to produce a favorable report? How much will it cost, and how
>> many people will it reach?" Not an argument of "are analysts good or bad."

Perhaps also add the question "what's the most cost effective way
to influence the analyst?" as well.

> Well, how much would it cost? Can you outbid Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM?

ISTM there are exactly 2 ways once can effectively influence such
analysts to say that Postgres is better than the alternatives.

1. For ethical analysts, the most cost effective way - and practically
the only way - is to produce a better product than the alternatives.
The analyst's job is to research the alternatives and honestly
describe them to their audience. If we can quantify the cost
to make postgres better than alternatives, that answer's the
cost question Greg and Josh are discussing.

2. For less ethical analysts, the most cost effective way is probably
to spend money on them - *and* do the legwork for getting favoriable
data for the report. I don't doubt that if someone wanted to
buy a report from Forrester to address the question "can postgres
scale to handle databases like skype's" and then gave them
willing skype contacts as references, they could write a glowing
report. But does that really accomplish much? It gets one nice
report, but has a one time effect while any resources spend on #1
has recurring effects until the competition catches up again.

I'm guessing that the most cost effective way to influence analysts
in the long run is to spend the resources making sure the product
is better than the competition.