Re: Slow parliament election processing in Estonia blamed on Postgres

How about stating something along the lines of:

There are hundreds if not thousands of applications using Postgres that
experience much heavier transactions loads and run in an exemplary fashion.
Some examples include:

Organization name, size of database or simultaneous users, or number of
transactions per day (granted we may need to leave off the org name, but you
get the idea)

Get the message across in an oh so subtle way that a poor carpenter blames
his tools.

And finally, make an offer that if refused only reflects poorly on the poor
guy who made such a silly statement: The PostgreSQL community would be happy
to review the database design and make recommendations so that this poor
carpenter and others like him don't make the same mistakes with PostgreSQL
or any other database they may choose to abuse.

#;-)

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 9:59 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:

>
> I received the following email via our press email address. It seems
> slow election processing in Estonia was blamed on the Postgres database.
> Any idea how to respond to this?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Hello,
>
> There was parliament elections in Estonia last sunday. Everything else
> went fine except the system lagged for most important hours during
> entering the votes from the departments.
>
> Helmes (www.helmes.ee), the developer of many other national systems,
> released a note to media on Monday accusing Postgresql database that it
> did not manage with the dataflow. Although to calculate for a second, then
> about 600 inserting people from the election departments who pass totally
> 50'000 rows to tables during two hours is a very slow day for most
> sql-systems. They mainly need only the next information for voting -
> department, candidate, total votes. So the real fault was in the brain of
> the database developer - it is silly to say subaru is bad if you cant
> drive rally-style and crash the car in the first corner.
>
> I hope Postgresql management will take action on this and give a reply in
> media, as accuses were against "freeware databases" - issues like this
> give them bad reputation and these databases wont be taken seriously the
> next time. I have used postgre and mysql for ten years to build up
> photobanks with millions of pictures inside and developed other large
> systems and met no mistakes, it all begins with good database design.
>
> News headlines in estonian concerning this topic:
>
> http://www.delfi.ee/news/rk/uudised/helmes-viga-oli-vabavaralises-andmebaasimootoris.d?id=41628665
>
> --
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
> EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com
>
> + It's impossible for everything to be true. +
>
> --
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