Re: LinuxTag wrapup

On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 05:59:17PM +0200, Andreas Pflug wrote:

> classifying the questions we got those three days in the PostgreSQL
> booth on LinuxTag, we had three ever repeating topics, two of them
> non-surprising:
> - what's the difference to MyS***
> - what about win32 native
> - what about Oracle portability.

That about covers the important stuff. Some more for the "other" bucket
(although they all came repeatedly):

- so how do I pronounce "Postgre"?
- will it support my performance requirements?
- are you a company? Can you tell me someone who is?
- have a job for me?
- do you have drivers for Kylix?
- why don't you support <product>?
- what client GUI programming environment do you offer?

On the "Postgre" point, I remarked to some friendly people (who are
developing a content management system based on postgres, by the way)
that we ought to have something like "just call me Postgres" posters in
our booth. It turned out they had the gear to cut stickers in letter
shapes, so a little while later we actually had those words plastered
over our booth walls. I think we got most interested passers-by before
they had a chance to read it, though.

On the last points I eventually learned to stop answering and shoot back
the question instead: "what, doesn't yours support ODBC?"

In particular, X.org's Leon Shiman felt that we Postgres people should be
especially interested in their work on X. I didn't even see what he was
getting at until he mentioned GUI builders. Again, I told him that my
personal conviction is that those should be database-agnostic and the very
idea that these should be bundled with database servers is a by-product of
the need to sell proprietary database licenses, and that any good free GUI
builder should build on GUI toolkits rather than on raw X, etc.

But like I said, that's just my personal conviction. I definitely think
people in our community ought to be willing to work together with the
MySQL people, the FireBird people and anybody else in the free world to
have world-class GUI development tools; it should be a rising tide that
raises all boats. If anyone feels differently, I did make it perfectly
clear that I wasn't speaking for anyone.

Of course one area where we should care about X, but I completely forgot
to mention this to Leon, is that modern graphics hardware can be used to
speed up database engines. Hardware detection of collisions or overlaps,
for instance, has been shown to be a viciously effective filter for
spatial joins in GIS databases. But that's another story!

Jeroen