Re: 7.4 Wishlist

> I might get together with some of the lecturers I've worked with in
> Sydney to give such a document some weight. I must say, the problem is not
> a technical one though. I've given talks to 3rd and 4th year students
> about PostgreSQL -- technical, conceptual, political talks... you name
> it. Out of 200 odd students, only about 5-10 actually seem interested. Its
> terrible.

I've given a talk in the 2002 honours lecture series at UWA about Postgres
and some of the things it can do. All of those guys were interested.
Especially since the deptartment does a lot of work in genetic algoriithms.

Tell me when you start working on a document - I'm happy to help. Since I'm
only just out of Uni, I'd like to write a set of possible assignments and
learning outcomes and how you can use postgres to support them.

My girlfriend is a PhD student at UWA CS dept :) plus I won the honours
scholarship there a year or two back, so I can get interest from the dept,
including the databases lecturer. Might help for another point of view and
feedback.

> Why aren't they interested? They think that if they study Oracle
> (instead) for 6 months they'll walk straight into a job with an extremely
> high salary. Its a myth, but I cannot shake that perception.

That's tragic. Teaching kids to admin oracle is something you do in Tafe,
or an Oracle course, not a university. Anyway, what kind of course teaches
you about how to admin oracle as opposed to teaching you about ACID
properties, MVCC, distributed transactions and partitioning? Most of which
can be demonstrated with Postgres. We learnt about relational model,
algebra and calculus well before learning about SQL!

Hell, my Uni (UWA) actually uses MS Access for crying out loud! We learn
heaps of theory for 'real' databases (as above), but then our semester
project is to implement in MS Access a bunch of tables and queries for a UN
aid mission, for example. Not once do you have to use SQL - you just use
the query builder. How lame!

I have friends who have worked with people who've gone thru the oracle
course. They say it's frustrating because they only understand what they've
been told to understand and have a lack of knowledge about basic, database
principles.

> In fact, things got very heated when two universities in Sydney moved
> their SQL courses from Oracle and Sybase to PostgreSQL. Enrollments will
> be down next year for the courses and Australian universities are heavily
> geared toward bums on seats not facilitation of education.

Universities are supposed to have a tradition of open source support. Just
imagine if the professors could not only teach about how to do SQL, but ALSO
teach kids how a parser and executor and rewriter work by looking at the
actual source code!

Imagine those kids who go on to do honours, masters and PHD's in database
theory, indexing or whatever who could end up contributing to Postgres? ;)

What a sell! (For a real uni, that is ;) )

Chris