Postgres 9.0 Feedback on Slashdot

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

I usually read the Slashdot comments about Postgres releases because it gives me a good barometer of how Postgres is perceived. I have been doing this for 10+ years, and started at the time when MySQL was the open source database darling, and Postgres was something "you might want to look at".

For Postgres 9.0, the comments were very positive. The comments include these glowing quotes:

• "PostgreSQL is one of the few examples of exceptional software engineering I provide as an example when somebody asks."
• "Finally, PostgreSQL is a proper independent open source project with a structure that all other open source projects should be judged by."

The Postgres documentation was mentioned several times:

• "It's actually one of the best manuals for SQL in general - at least, in my experience, it has the most clear explanations of many more advanced SQL constructs that are common between various RDBMSes."
• "AFAIC, it is the standard by which other software manuals should be judged."
• "If one could have any complaint it could be that there is just so much of it [documentation]."

Even the appearance improvements for the web documentation got a mention .

Finally, a discussion about whether conditional triggers added in Postgres 9.0 is a useful feature yielded this humorous news report:

Two DBA's shot each other dead yesterday morning after they fell out over the maintainability of column-based conditional triggers. A police officer at the scene remarked: "If only they had been using MySQL with the default ISAM tables which support no such functionality, then none of this would have happened."