training as a means of advocacy?

This is a suggestion; I do not need a reply.

I'm a DB novice fleeing from MS Access to opensource, considering
various options, and finding that the complexity of the software
offerings is quite daunting!

So far, in my quest for training, I have found several very expensive
options and several discussions about why certification is/is not a good
idea. I have no idea whether many other people in need of software to
build databases are looking at opensource tools, but since this is your
'advocacy' forum, I suggest that one way to increase adoption of the
software is to make it more accessible to people who need a solution.

That may seem obvious, but what I see is that if a non-geek wants to
escape the limits of Excel or the intense convolution of Access, there
are few (if any) opensource options. There's OpenOffice's Calc and
Base, but they seem to offer the sole advantage of a free price for
merely clones of the problems, if I'm not mistaken (currently testing
and finding this to be true). Otherwise, one who is not already a
programmer and/or savvy database developer must choke down the price of
FileMaker or 4D or something like that. As for me, and I bet with many,
my company will not provide "non-standard software". The standard is
Excel, Access, Oracle; and Oracle is only available to the IT
department. The only way I can break the rules is to download
opensource (no invoice, no red flags...)

MySQL bills itself as "easy". Anyone can do it. [insert expletive
here]!!! So, I got Navicat, which makes things easier for the non-guru.
But it's still grossly complicated, and training costs a fortune, or
gobs of time. Both. So, I found some cheap online tutorials, which
explained differences among various kinds of databases, and found that I
would prefer an object-relational database over a relational one. Out
goes MySQL, which I will not miss. Navicat makes their GUI for
PostgreSQL, too.

However, I am finding training is even more difficult to find for
PostgreSQL. My situation requires online courses or travel to a
classroom for a short course; onsite training isn't cost effective for
one person. Unless I want to go to Germany, all classes I can find
assume the student already knows Linux and SQL and has experience with a
similar program like Oracle, and is familiar with numerous acronyms.

So here's my point: If you want to just keep competing for acceptance
and adoption of PostgreSQL by the highly paid, highly trained pool of
database development experts who are competing for work in a finite
market of enterprise database clients, then fine. I'm sure all those
people have plenty of time to search your forums all day to learn the
ropes. But, if you want to attract the attention of a large segment of
industry consisting of people who are not trained in programming, who do
not have huge budgets, who can't spend all their time searching the
Internet for technical help, and who nevertheless need to build
databases for their work; then you should skip the certification issue
and put some effort into helping such people climb the ladder from the
ground up.

I know, there's an argument to be made that such people do not need an
enterprise system to handle their little databases with their cute
little reports and entry forms and charts. Even so, if it works for big
systems it should handle small ones just fine. Most people don't need
most of the features of most software that they use anyway, right? If
many average joes use, and get to really like, PostgreSQL then its
popularity will spread, especially given the price, and managers will
notice productivity gains, and pretty soon they'll ask why in the heck
they should go through all those painful steps to get IT to make
database solutions for them when their own people can do it using free
software in half the time (and be pleased with the product)?

There are already several free tutorials on SQL, database design, and
data modeling. The rest is a mystery. A very complicated one. I
challenge you geeks to make it palatable to us newbies (or whatever you
call us).

Thanks

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