Re: PostgreSQL infographics

>> I'm interested help building such infographics for the PostgreSQL
>> project but I believe this should be a collective work, with a long term
>> perspective. The numbers are not that hard to gather (pages hits on the
>> website ? , mail traffic on pgsql-hackers ? git stats ?) and we can find
>> even more stats from services like ohloh
>> (http://www.ohloh.net/p/postgres)... But I think the hard part will
>> keeping the numbers up-to-date and release a new version on a regular
>> basis (maybe once every semester ?)
>>
>> Is anyone else interested by creating this infographic ?
>
> I am interested, but I would want to augment the dataset that we are showing. While I think it is interesting seeing the history of PostgreSQL development shown visually, I think would also be beneficial if we could show statistics that indicate adoption and usage as well. Number of downloads over time would be a good place to start, but trying to determine what percentage of the RDBMS market or the total database market would be great at helping us indicate how much more PostgreSQL is being adopted. Even an estimate of how much data is being stored in Postgres globally would be insightful.
>
> I know it is difficult to collect that data but I think it could significantly help advocacy efforts by easily displaying adoption statistics.
>

Imho, we can build several infographics. Right now I'm talking about
showing the rapid progress of the community (lines of codes,
contributors, ML traffic, etc.) because it's easier to start with that
and I think it's important the make a quick and easy first step in order
to launch a project like that.

The numbers you're talking about are important. Everyone is looking for
some maket share stats.... I think its a very difficult and probably
endless quest :-) And even if that's possible, I tend to believe that
the "market share" approach is a trap for PostgreSQL. I mean what are we
talking about ? How do you express that ? In terms of "Sales Revenue" ?
The revenues of PostgreSQL itself will always be zero... You can
aggregate the revenue of each PostgreSQL related company in the world
but even if it was realistic, we'd still be far below Oracle.

And if we're talking about "Unit market share", in terms of number of
servers installed then MySQL will be ahead for a long long time. So
that's not a key indicator of market competitiveness either.

More and more, I try to avoid putting the words "percentage" and
"market" in the same sentence :-) Simply because in order to fully
understand the meaning of that kind numbers, you need to understand
first the difference between the economic models of PostgreSQL and other
RDBMS. This might change in a near future but for now most managers I
meet don't have that understanding and therefore giving market share
percentage to them is like shooting myself in the foot :-)