Re: I am being interviewed by OReilly

On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 10:55:45AM -0300, suga(at)netbsd(dot)com(dot)br wrote:

> users. Just to mention MySQL, it's much more known and deployed. Why?
> Software? Don't think so. It's name is simple, it's logo is great, and it
> has a nice homepage and users advocating. Success is not just product
> quality.

I don't actually care at all what the-RDBMS-we-use-now is called, and
I'm loathe to add fuel to the fire, but I doubt very much that
MySQL's success is due to its name and logo. I suspect it has
something of a "first mover" advantage: when people wanted to set up
quick-and-dirty SQL databases, MySQL was "free enough" and "good
enough" for the purposes. So some people (notably Slashdot) used it,
and that caused others to use it, and now there are a lot of people
using it.

PostgreSQL was originally something of an academic project, and it
was seriously buggy and slow in its early days. It's gained a lot of
ground, but in the absence of MySQL-killer features, people don't
move. It turns out that PostgreSQL _has_ some killer features; when
people need them, they do move. But for most purposes (like web
pages), MySQL is still good enough. (It always seemed like a toy to
me, but then I always needed a system that would not lose data no
matter what. I gather it's improved, so don't start a flamefest
about that -- I just don't care.)

PostgreSQL's real marketing problem is that it's too good to be
needed by the MySQL crowd (or they switch), and it's not a big
commercial package for the we-need-a-big-commercial-package crowd.
It's far from obvious that a name change would help in the latter
case, which is the real market potential. I wish I know what _would_
help that, though, in the absence of (sigh) Great Bridge.

A

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