Re: Is there a shortage of postgresql skilled ops people

On Mar 27, 2007, at 9:37 AM, Merlin Moncure wrote:

> On 3/27/07, Marc Evans <Marc(at)softwarehackery(dot)com> wrote:
>> Hello -
>>
>> Over the past couple of years I have made use of postgresql as my
>> database
>> of choice when developing new software. During that time, my
>> clients have
>> in multiple cases eventually come back to me and requested a re-
>> targeting
>> to "Any database that we (my client) can find skilled ops staff to
>> support." In a most recent case, professional recruiters were
>> employed to
>> try to find such people. The search was disappointing at best.
>>
>> My question for this community is, what do enterprises that you
>> deploy
>> postgresql within do for skilled operations staffing? I can
>> understand
>> trying to convert a mysql or Oracle person to work on postgresql,
>> but it
>> would be very helpful to have a potential talent pool to draw from
>> that
>> was similar to those others. Finding people with HA, scaling and
>> performance tuning knowledge is something that seems impossible to
>> find
>> except in people wanting to be developers.
>>
>> The sad reality from what I have observed is that unless more
>> people gain
>> those skills and want to work in ops, it's becoming very hard for
>> me to
>> justify recommending postgresql for enterprise (or larger) scale
>> projects.
>>
>> What do others do and/or experience?
>
> PostgreSQL talent is in high demand. From perspective of
> maintainability, this is probably the only drawback (but a serious
> one) to choose it as a platform to run a company on. There is, IMO, a
> good reason for this...pg people tend to be very good and tend to stay
> employed...
>
> If I was in your position, I would suggest contracting is the best way
> to go for those companies, either through yourself (the obvious
> choice), or hook them up with some of the bigger names in the
> postgresql community, command prompt, agliodbs, etc.

Not having looked myself, this is as much a question as a suggestion,
but are there not postgres dba training seminars/courses you could
recommend they send their dba's to?

erik jones <erik(at)myemma(dot)com>
software developer
615-296-0838
emma(r)