Re: The naming question WAS: Theme of this release: Performance?

I hear you, Josh. There¹s good reason to leave things as they are,
especially given the questionable incremental value compared with the large
effort involved.

On the other hand, I think it¹s time. I believe PostgreSQL was so named to
call attention to the fact that Postgres adopted SQL syntax, which is now
very old news. Furthermore, every modern RDBMS uses SQL, and calling it out
actually makes us sound old-school, IMHO. And finally, it¹s an awkward name.
It¹s not a huge issue, but I think it should be changed at some point in the
near future. EnterpriseDB will certainly pull our weight in the changeover,
if the community decides to move forward with it. If not, that¹s ok too.

Andy

On 8/26/07 2:43 PM, "Josh Berkus" <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:

> Folks,
>
> My perspective on the naming question is that if we wanted to do it, we needed
> to do it for 8.0 which was when PostgreSQL became much higher profile. We
> did seriously evaluate it at that time, but the amount of effort involved
> would have held up the release and we decided not to.
>
> It is still the case that changing the name would involve a lot of tedious
> effort and hunting down references. Also, we don't have nearly as good
> control of the various postgres.* domains as we do of postgresql.*.
> (notably, postgres.net belongs to some unknown individual who refuses to sell
> it to me).
>
> Overall, I'd say that the advantages of changing the name don't balance the
> effort involved in doing so. That's a very qualitative judgement though, and
> if there was overwhelming support in the community, *including* several
> volunteers to help do the work, I'd certainly re-consider my stance.
>
> Also note that I was chatting with Kaj Arno at OSCON, and he was bitching
> about people mispronouncing "MySQL". So don't assume that shortening our
> name would necessarily help ...
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
> PostgreSQL @ Sun
> San Francisco
>
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