On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 06:24:09AM -0700, Robert Bernier wrote:
Although no way near as knowledgeable as many of you regarding the
inner workings of MySQL, let alone postgres, I do however recognize
navel gazing when I see it. The first article starting this thread was
a convoluted justification of one's own religion. This second article
is pure commercial leveraging of a thread that's garnered a lot of
attention.
It's time a response from the postgres community was forthcoming.
I think this new blog post does a good job of summarizing the issues
Uber had with Postgres. The blog comments correct some things, get some
things wrong, but eventually right. (The thread about disk performance
can be ignored.)
In some ways any PR is good PR, and I see the general issue being that
Uber didn't like some of the technical decisions we made, and tradeoffs
we decided, but few are saying those decisions were wrong, just focused
on different workloads.
I do think we are winning when we don't act defensively but are open to
criticism --- I think it shows confidence, and I think we have a right
to be confident.
+1 but I think it is good if we do have a response as a community through a well-read channel that shows both that we can accept constructive criticism and how we learn from it - this is good PR.
For example, when Per Se was downgraded from 4-stars to 2-stars in the NYT restaurant review, Thomas Keller, the owner, issued a statement in a very similar fashion: taking pride in his team’s work but acknowledging there is room for improvement and have a willingness to do so:
Because the response was not defensive and included a commitment to improving, it was well-received.
I suggest we craft a response in a similar nature: acknowledging there is always room to improve and understanding the different use-cases for Postgres will help the team developing it to create a system that can be freely and easily adopted and maintained. I suggest that the piece come from -core. I recommend we post it in the news section on .org as it comes straight from the source and so people can easily find and link to it .
I know what I recommend is unprecedented, but the growth and visibility the PostgreSQL community has now is also unprecedented in its history and it would demonstrate a maturity and willingness to learn and improve.
Jonathan