Re: Scalability in postgres

2009/5/29 Grzegorz Jaśkiewicz <gryzman(at)gmail(dot)com>:
> damn I agree with you Scott. I wish I had enough cash here to employ
> Tom and other pg magicians to improve performance for all of us ;)
>
> Thing is tho, postgresql is mostly used by companies, that either
> don't have that sort of cash, but still like to get the performance,
> or companies that have 'why pay if it is free' policy.

It really is two very different kinds of companies. I have a friend
who used to work somewhere that the boss was a total cheapskate, and
for that reason, and that reason alone, had chosen PostgreSQL.
Because of his overly cheap ways, the company just sucked the life out
of its employees.

OTOH, I now work for a company that uses PostgreSQL because it's the
best fit solution that allows great performance on reasonable hardware
for little money. If Oracle provided a serious competitive advantage
we'd switch. But it really doesn't for us, and for 90% of the db folk
out there it doesn't either.

> now, about UK, combined with Ireland still is bit smaller than US ;)
> I don't know how about US, but in UK most companies still believe that
> MSCE personnel, few windows servers, with mssql are the best thing you
> can get... so.

There's still plenty of that mentality here in the old USA as well.
Last company I was at was taken over by managers with a MS and only MS
mentality. They spent 4 years replacing a pair of Linux servers that
provided web services and LDAP with about 40 MS machines. CIO swore
there would be no more Linux in the company. Since then they've
bought up a couple dozen smaller companies, most of which were running
on Linux, and they've had to hire back a lot of Linux talent to keep
it running.

> Oracle is really used by very very small minority.

And sadly, an awful lot of those installations are Oracle "by default"
not because it's the best choice.