Re: Is there a shortage of postgresql skilled ops people

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.

merlin