The Linux Journal announced the Vencedores do Editors Choice Awards 2003.

Claro que, o premio de melhor banco de dados é do PostgreSQL.

Colaboradores: snpe snpe em snpe.co.yu, elein em varlena.com

Nossa Sessão de "Muvuca" (este é o nome dado no Brasil para os primeiros BOF feitos por brasileiros no JavaOne/2002) na Quarta-feira à noite foi a primeira vez que eu vi todas as pessoas do PostgreSQL juntas ao mesmo tempo. Foi uma pena não marcarmos o encontro antes da conferência, contando por volta de trinta pessoas assistindo e discutindo ao vivo. Outras pessoas tiveram que contar uma história sobre jantares tardios à noite.

Um retorno em particular que chegou até mim (de outras listas pode variar) foi a falta de um marketing organizado, falta de visibilidade, e da caótica natureza de nossos sites. Nenhuma destas reclamações foram surpresa pra ninguém. O grupo de marketing (advocacy) tem tomado algumas decisões significantes com considerações para retificar estes itens.

Talvez nem todo mundo saiba de três acontecimentos recentes favoreceram nossos esforços em marketing. Primeiro, Jash Berkus foi recrutado no Grupo de Desenvolvimento Principal (Core Development Group). Os pontos fortes de Josh estão em organização e marketing (e performance como você viu na edição anterior). Sob os cuidados de Josh, os esforços para angariar fundos de marketing já começaram. Marc Fournier também já anunciou que parte dos lucros das propagandas adicionadas nas páginas do site postgresql.org também contribuirão com o fundo de marketing. Nós também estamos planejando conseguir um quiosque , uma presença, na Comdex. Somando aos itens acima, voluntários estão trabalhando em brochuras, réplicas de CDs, etc. então, nós obtemos algum efeito colateral do marketing já feito. É bom saber que nós estamos no caminho certo.

Outra parte da discussão na sessão de "muvuca" foi sobre a porta nativa do PC que está sendo adiada até depois da liberação da versão 7.4. A discussão sobre porque a porta é ou não importante, principalmente à luz do marketing e da visibilidade, foram ambos dados ao tempo de mercado.

As pessoas ligadas ao PostgreSQL não foram particularmente visíveis na abrangência geral da conferência. Nós estávamos lá, mas não nos vimos muito. Diversas das palestras na conferência e as discussões em nossa sessão de "muvuca" apontaram que os projetos de código aberto precisam estabelecer relacionamentos com outras organizações de código aberto. Eu sei que alguns de nós são membros de mais de um grupo de código aberto, mas na maioria do tempo, nos mantemos um pouco isolados. Falamos uns com os outros. Razões à parte. Isto é código aberto, então, roubam idéias que funcionam! Por exemplo, nós precisamos de mais visibilidade, voz e grupos de usuários ativos ao redor do mundo, incluindo nos Estados Unidos. E os evangelistas têm praticamente obtido sucessos consecutivos. Quais conselhos podemos extrair deles?

O estabelecimento de relacionamentos entre pessoas e grupos foi despertado em diversos contextos na conferência. O banco de dados PostgreSQL, principalmente, aproveitou-se bastante destes relacionamentos. Há algo nestes relacionamentos que nós possamos usar para promover nosso bancos de dados favorito?

Um erro que foi cometido pelo menos uma vez foram as más línguas percebidas da concorrência. Boatos de frustrações de outros são uma coisa, mas mesmo assim, com nossa pequena visibilidade, nós causamos uma boa impressão. No entanto, todos sabem que somos tecnicamente mais maduros e podemos concorrer com qualquer outro no mercado. Porém, não há necessidade de atacar os outros. Eu tenho certeza que seria culpada disto também. Mas línguas e canetas reprimidas (ou teclados) é o que se percebe com mais força. Srta. Boas Meneiras!

Para nós, eu acredito, que o ponto seja somente boa tecnologia. O mais alto ponto pago por qualquer programa ou equipamento é Ele simplesmente funciona! Bancos de Dados são programas altamente complexos para resolver problemas complexos de gerenciamento de dados armazenados e recuperá-los. E o PostgreSQL é rico em características para lidar com as complexidades deste conjunto de problemas. Nós não pretendemos ser simples. Mas o PostgreSQL possui adicionalmente maturidade, estabilidade e concordância aos padrões, então, eu acredito que este mérito esteja dentro da nossa compreensão:

Outros participantes: Se você tem comentários sobre a conferência envie-os para mailto:elein@varlena.com?Subject=OSCON%Opinions e eles serão adicionados a estes.

A discussão dos itens levantados aqui é tratada apropriadamente na lista de discussão PostgreSQL Advocacy .

Editor: elein em varlena.com

Joe Conway escreve:

I have no facts or figures to back this up, but it "felt" to me like the PostgreSQL community was less visible (in terms of numbers of presentations) and less attended than last year. The presentations and tutorials delivered were very good, but there just weren't enough of them.

I would have like to have seen PostgreSQL tutorials on both Monday and Tuesday (instead of just Monday), and Postgres presentations on all three days of sessions (instead of just Thursday).

I think part of the problem was that Bruce got very late notice from O'Reilly regarding submissions this year. Next year we should get the word out far and wide and early so that we get more people stepping up to speak. We should also make a concerted effort to get PostgreSQL on O'Reilly's radar.

Greg Sabino Mullane escreve:

Here are my quick* notes about OSCON from a PostgreSQL perspective.
 * You should see my long notes. :)

It was great finally getting to meet so many of them names I have only seen on the Internet (mostly the mailing lists) and get to interact with people. Sometimes we even managed to talk about non-Pg/non-technical things. But not very often. :)

The Postgres presentations were all very good. I went to some of the MySQL presentations, and they were not that good. Maybe they should spend some of that $19 million on public speaking classes. I particularly enjoyed Tom Lane's talk, as that one was the closest to mine - SQL tuning - and gave a nice glimpse into the changes for 7.4. Very impressive stuff. Even Marty from MySQL was at that talk, asking questions. I am constantly amazed at some of the smart things Postgres does behind the scenes.

Someone made the argument that we don't need to focus on the Win32 port right now, as the Microsoft share of the market is declining. This seemed to be the minority view, especially in light of the fact that we are very close to being done. My own take on this is that we are the only database that I can think of that does *not* have a native Win32 port. If it is good enough for Oracle...

Someone else mentioned that they would often go to sourceforge while looking for a project to help them out and would end up converting the app to Postgres, as most of them are only for MySQL. Although this was a side comment to something else, it got me to thinking: why not have another part of Postgres that would coordinate converting all the apps in the world to run with PostgreSQL? I envision a page where people could add projects that need to be converted to a list. Other people could do the actual converting, perhaps with a final checkoff by a reviewer, and the project could be marked as "done." We would not only automatically generate a list of applications that run PostgreSQL, but would have another list that would show the status of other apps. Outside users could even request to have a particular app ported. I see this as being a very important part of the PostgreSQL project, similar in importance to the web, source, and advocacy projects. When I get some time, I'll probably start a prototype.

Another thing mentioned was the lack of visibility at OSCON. Although we had some very good, high-quality presentations, I feel that our visibility was absolutely terrible at OSCON. We were off hiding in a corner while MySQL was out there shouting "Here I am!". From the t-shirt given to each participant (MySQL, *not* O'Reilly like in previous years) to Tim O'Reilly's reinforcement of the terrible LAMP acronym in his keynote, to the lack of any mention of Postgres in the "hallway" or when discussing other projects, Postgres just seemed to be off the radar. Our only redeeming feature was that we had our own track. Even with that, we should have had more presentations. I have some ideas for next year's, and I think we need to hit the conference early and hard with submissions. I especially would like to see presentations that tie Postgres into other projects and/or applications. I would also like to see more that target the "unknown" user - people who have heard of Postgres, but are new to it or are still evaluating it. Sometimes I feel we preach to the choir at the expense of new converts.

A radical idea about reorganizing underneath the Apache project was bravely tossed out to the group. I don't think that would ever happen (but spent some time debating the idea with the originator the next day), but something like that is certainly needed as far as consolidating the PostgreSQL project into a single legal entity that can do things like receive funds, send people to conferences, publish materials, coordinate contacts, etc. Almost a combination of the core group and the advocacy group. Apache has an interesting model: a "core" business (actually a foundation, which may be the best for Postgres), and a bunch of "interest groups" that handle one project. In our case, I could easily see a main foundation that includes a technical group (source code), an advocacy group, a web site group (also FTP/DNS/etc), and an application group (as mentioned above, whose goal is to port other projects). I have more ideas about all of this, but in the interest of space, I shall move on.

Someone threw out the ol' "let's ignore MySQL, and focus on DB2" argument. (Feel free to replace "DB2" with "Microsoft SQL Server" or "Oracle" of course). I think this is a big mistake. As I pointed out to the group, we need to be concerned with /all/ the other players, not just the large commercial ones. Someone else (sorry, do not know who) pointed out that while MySQL might have been a "toy" 18 months ago, they are not now, and are moving forward at a significant speed. I was fairly surprised to hear the "ignore MySQL" argument at an open-source conference of all places. Winning the mindshare of the open-source community should be one of our highest goals. And right now, MySQL has that mindshare firmly in their hands. Underestimating the importance of that mindshare, and underestimating MySQL, are two things that the Postgres project cannot afford to do. Most people at the BOF seemed to agree that MySQL is still a concern.

As mentioned before, the importance and timing of future features was mentioned. Things on the radar include replication, point-in-time recovery (PITR), two-phase commit (2PC), nested transaction, and the Win32 port. Some things (replication) are much closer than others (nested transactions). All of them are needed, but after the BOF I was starting to wonder: what now? What's the next Big Thing after we get those five done? (Using "we" in the "I ain't written a single line of code to help any of those five out" of course! :) I am sure that replication will still be a monster, as there are many ways to do it and it can can very complex. Still, it will soon be one less thing the MySQL folks can beat us up about once we have a working, built-in solution.

We also talked about the problem of getting companies to state that they are using Postgres. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: nobody will admit that they are using Postgres until lots of other companies are publicly admitting that they are using Postgres. Major thanks to Andrew Sullivan for starting that egg rolling by extracting enough information from other companies to enable him to fight hard to get Postgres as the backend for the .info and .org domains. Someone else (again, cannot remember many names) suggested that we should be recording all companies that use Postgres, even if they are not large. Someone else asked about the case studies: as far as anyone knows, we have bunch, but they are not on the website yet.

There is lot more to say, but overall it was a great experience, not just from a PostgreSQL perspective, but from a general technical one as well. Postgres has a very strong community, but it needs some visibility and legitimacy. I've got some great t-shirts idea for next year...

E por último, David Fetter escreve:

The "LAMP" concept is a serious obstacle to PostgreSQL adoption and development. This requires a substantial marketing effort. How big is MySQL's purse? To what extent is O'Reilly politically committed to it?

I realized that what PostgreSQL really needs is an aggressive and well-funded marketing effort.

I've found that it is unproductive to pretend that a debate is happening when the other side is not engaging in a debate. ...[other projects] have been consistently engaging in deception, misinformation and outright lies... To miss that point, publicly or privately, is to lose the fight.

Como havia prometido, aqui está a palestra que eu ministrei na OSCON. Há três partes, anotações, slides e o código fonte dos exemplos.

Palestra sobre Rodando Funções Agregadas usando PostgreSQL e plpython.
© A. Elein Mustain 2003
Presented Conferência de Código Aberto da O'Reilly, Julho de 2003, Portland, OR

• Slides
• Código Fonte
• Anotações

  Caveat: Estas são minhas anotações nesta palestra. Elas não são necessariamente completas, nem são definitivamente gravadas de qualquer palestra ao vivo, real ou imaginária.

  Modificações do conteúdo das anotações originais baseadas em novas informações estão anotadas em itálico.

Como sempre, comentários e questões são bem vindos.

Colaboradores: elein em varlena.com