Re: 7.4 Press Release -- starting Draft #5

"Just as good as the big guys" makes us sound smaller and
of minor interest. Aren't we one of the grown ups?
When do we get to be grown up?

--elein

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 05:13:34PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Robert, PGadvocates
>
> First of all, thanks for keeping track of all these changes! I was not
> looking forward to combing through all of the last 3 days' email. Thank you.
>
> However, I've been thinking some about the tone of the press release.
> Currently, what we have is essentially the technical announcement, "dumbed
> down" for the general press. While this gives us the correct content, it
> lacks "punch" that will interest reporters.
>
> Or, as Heather put it:
> > please let me know. From what I've seen so far I'd suggest tightening up the
> > lead and adding in the one big idea as to why 7.4 is important. Basically my
> > experience has been that you need to say everything in a short and concise
> > lead or the reporter doesn't even move his mouse to scroll down before
> > hitting the delete button :)
>
> As such, I think we need to re-draft the press release to put the "big news"
> stuff at the top and the "unrelated" detail at the bottom. And what's our
> "big news"?
>
> Well, the combined fixes and enhancements in 7.4, perhaps for the first time,
> really puts PostgreSQL's core functionality on even footing with Oracle and
> DB2 for large enterprise needs. Particularly I am thinking of:
> -- planner improvements for speed
> -- index-FSM means that a well-tuned 7.4 database no longer has to lock any
> tables ever for maintainence; true 99.99% uptime at last.
> -- donation of eRServer gives us a "battle-tested" replication solution
> -- read-only transaction setting improves multiuser security
> -- 64 bit support including Opteron
> -- new wire protocol speeds transfer of large objects
>
> Secondary to that but also important to "punch up" are the features that make
> it easier for enterprise to transition from proprietary databases:
> -- error reporting re-design allows vastly improved handling of errors by
> middleware for large distributed applications, especially since we use
> SQL-standard error codes
> -- join rewrite makes an easier transition for MS SQL & Sybase apps
> -- multibyte regex broadens our international support
> -- improved Tsearch exceeds MySQL's FTI and MSSQL's FTS;
> and, most importantly:
> -- reorganized and improved documentation makes the transition to PostgreSQL
> easier than it ever has been before.
>
> The other features/improvements, while important to our internal community,
> aren't going to make sense to most reporters. Instead, we need to tell a
> story -- a simple story -- which says:
> "Evaluate and switch to PostgreSQL now, it will be easy and we're just as good
> as the Big Guys."
>
> Am I making any sense?
>
> --
> -Josh Berkus
> Aglio Database Solutions
> San Francisco
>
>
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