Re: Help me improve the 9.2 release announcement!

> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>> On 08/07/2012 02:00 PM, Rob Napier wrote:
>>
>>>> Can someone suggest a way to work range types into a simple,
>>>> 2-part theme which doesn't obscure the JSON message?
>>>
>>> As for the WeirdNewTypes, it needs a simple lo-tech way of
>>> explaining it. Maybe a short, simple example of how it is
>>> applied.
>>
>> "CoolNewTypes"
>>
>> Weird implies well wierd, they aren't weird, they are cool, hot,
>> nifty, rocking.
>
> Yeah, if we need to punch just two points, with the ability to
> elaborate a little, I would say performance (with emphasis on being
> able to scale well to larger volumes and big new hardware) and new
> types to simplify life for application programmers (JSON and
> ranges).
>
> JSON is all the rage with web-oriented programmers. There is a
> group of people for whom there pretty much couldn't be bigger
> PostgreSQL news than this feature. When we get to the day that we
> have an HTTP access method that provides a "RESTful" interface to
> database data through JSON, the web programmmers here will probably
> throw a big party over how easy we've made their work. 9.2 doesn't
> take it all the way there, but it is a giant leap in that direction,
> which will cause some jaws to drop around here.

From a marketing perspective, touting the JSON support will definitely get some more eyeballs from the web community. Being in the web in the "web-oriented programmer" category myself, if I were to further look into the 9.2 JSON support, I would come away wondering what the "hype" is with it as, on a functional basis, it just ensures that I store valid JSON in the database. If I had to do any more serious data processing on evaluation and would prefer to do it at the database level, I would look at another data source.

As I said before, I'm glad Postgres is starting to have JSON support (I've randomly bugged people for it through the years :-), but we do need to make sure we point out our strengths.

> On the other hand, I suspect that ranges will get wider adoption,
> because there are so many places that they make existing queries
> simpler and faster, regardless of whether you are web-oriented. The
> obvious applications are related to scheduling, but I suspect it
> will be put to many other uses.

+1 and especially for a "web-oriented developer, " once you understand what ranges can do, you suddenly have a lot of very fast querying options :-) For instance, just about anything involving a "slider" UI element that on a web page that goes into a search can be turned into a range query. At the end of the day, most web-developers care about speed and simple ways to extract performance out of the tools they are using.

Jonathan
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Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:22:01 -0700
From: Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>
Organization: PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
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Subject: Re: Call for RCs for 9.2 release
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> Therefore, unless there are objections or others willing to handle these duties, I'd like to become the RC for Ukraine.
> My phone number is: +380 91 917-70-43.

Sounds good to me!

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com