Re: "Too far out of the mainstream"

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 02:25:13PM -0500, Andy Yoder wrote:

> I would like the community's input on a topic. The words "too far
> out of the mainstream" are from an e-mail we received from one of
> our clients, describing the concern our client's IT group has about
> our use of PostgreSQL in our shop. The group in question supports
> multiple different databases, including Oracle, MySQL, SQLServer,
> DB2, and even some non-relational databases (think Cobol and
> file-based storage), each type with a variety of applications and
> support needs. We are in the running for getting a large contract
> from them and need to address their question: "What makes PostgreSQL
> no more risky than any other database?"

This canard has been going around for years. Anyone who thinks that
MySQL, with its sketchy guarantees of data integrity and persistence,
is mainstream-acceptable but Postgres isn't because they haven't read
about it in InfoWorld (or wherever they get their news) is just
believing too much of whatever marketing material their vendors are
shoveling at them.

A response to this sort of question from the .org TLD redelegation is
still available online:
http://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/org/questions-to-applicants-13.htm#Response13TheInternetSocietyISOC.
The details in that answer are all obsolete, of course, since it's
from several years (and Postgres versions) ago, but you can use it as
a cheat sheet in formulating your answer. For what it's worth, .org
was redelegated from Verisign to Public Interest Registry, and the
resulting system used PostgreSQL (instead of Oracle).

There are more recent community marketing materials around, but I
thought I'd point you to this one because the kind of pressure we were
under at the time was pretty much exactly as you're describing.

Good luck.

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca