Re: Companies involved in development

I think it would be a huge benefit for the community to have some more
company-funding. This would lead to the implementation of some features
people need urgently (replication in the core and so forth). On the
other hand a better product makes even more developers work for
PostgreSQL. We were thinking of funding the project as well and seems to
be a good way of improving the product we make our living of. We have
also tried to get some government funding we could invest into
PostgreSQL but unfornately all we could get was EUR 10k which is some
kind of ridiculous. We should have invested much more but it is just not
possible at this point so we dropped the idea.
For a company PostgreSQL definitely is an interesting area to invest
because it has proven to be a good product and there are just minor
things (sync. replication - eg. Postgres-R) missing to make it a real
enterprise database. The support of the community of more than just
optimal and it is an interesting subject.
Talking about practical experience: Our customers love PostgreSQL. The
only thing they miss is 24x7 availability due to a lack of hot-failover
and replication. A way to tweak the optimizer better (some have SQL
statements being 2 pages long).
We have done quite a lot of Oracle up to now but in many respects
PostgreSQL seems to be the better product but in the case of
availability we fail. The database never crashes but it is just to hard
to make a cluster out of it - we have to do it on an application level
and too many people worry about conistency if one node fails.

Also: It would be interesting to have a special section on the website
where people can post that they need money to implement something really
useful. I guess there'd be a lot of people who'd pay for replication or
things like that if they knew more.
By the way; many people seem to think that PostgreSQL is GPL license. I
know it is easy to find out what it means and that it is now that way
but we should explain what BSD license REALLY means in just a few words.
This may sound ridiculous but people just don't look for information.

All in all I think that there are ways to find people contributing
financially to the project.

Regards,
Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>I think we are going to see more company-funded developers working on
>PostgreSQL. There are a handful now, but I can see lots more coming.
>I am going to work on getting those funding companies more visibility.
>We originally were concerned that such involvement may harm the
>development process, but history has shown that it has only been a huge
>benefit for the community.
>
>

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