Re: PR: release text updated

This is quite a bit better. It meets the needs of a reporter writing a larger story pretty well. It covers the news of general interest, which is adoption, and also details the product related items. If there is something there that strikes a reporter's eye, they have enough to call a customer, developer, vendor, whatever and ask them a leading question.

However, I don't think it meets the needs of a reporter writing a small "breaking news" or blog type article, which are all the rage these days. Those types need to quickly be able to figure out "what is the news that I need to share". The adoption is straightforward and can be boiled down to two sentences. The challenge is getting a product related sound bite.

From a semi-educated perspective, there appears no fundamental difference between the first three and the remaining four. One could take any ordering of the 7 and the release would be no different. What often works well is to make up a couple of themes and tag the different items as proof points for the theme.

How about something like this right after the quote from that corporate guy ...

PostgreSQL 8.1 includes numerous performance improvements in large deployments, such as better scalability on large, multi-way and multi-core systems, better query performance due to a novel bitmap indexing strategy, and better partitioning. It also includes programmer oriented features allowing PostgreSQL to take over even more database workloads, including roles, 2pc and IN/OUT params. These features will continue the adoption trend established by PG 8.0.

Then, we lead in the the actual feature detail. A breaking news type reporter can just skim those parts. The release then ends with a solid proof point on performance.

Also, I'd recommend you combine the two performance proof points into one. Having two proof points for performance and none for anything else seems non symetric. You could bridge the two by something like this
[merlin quote]. These findings are backed up by testing conducted by the Open Source Development Labs, which found [OSDL sentence].

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Treat [mailto:xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net]
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 2:28 PM
To: pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [pgsql-advocacy] PR: release text updated

I've updated the release text to include Simons changes, along with a few
things I mention before. You can see the latest version here:
http://cvs.pgfoundry.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/press/pr/releases/8.1/en/ just
click on the link under "revision".

I have also re-order the three man features to roles -> inout -> 2pc, based on
roles being something everyone will use, inout being something highly
desirable for people migrating to pg from oracle/m$/firebird/etc... and 2pc
being much more niche than the other two (especially given the current xa
contreversy).

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

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