Re: Linux User (& Developer) Expo 2004 - A brief

On Wed, 2004-04-21 at 22:03, Richard Huxton wrote:
> This is a brief summary for people - Oliver is busy the next day/two and I'll
> be out and about Friday, so I thought it might be sensible to get some notes
> down.

I'm still busy! and I'm going to Israel for a week, so here is only a
brief addition to what Richard wrote.

1. I had several people come up to say thank you for PostgreSQL!  I
found that very encouraging and I want to pass the message on.

2. I had up to 10 people ask why they should choose Pg in preference to
MySQL.  My answer was: reliability, scalability, standards-compliance
and no licensing issues.

3. Some people were, in effect, complaining that we weren't marketing Pg
- "Why don't we see much in the press about PostgreSQL?"  I pointed out
that a wholly volunteer operation doesn't have a marketing budget.  In
this respect, Pg is in the same position as Debian.  In either case, I
think that we have to establish our position by technical excellence and
not try to do things as the commercial competition does.  However,
additional publicity would certainly be welcome.

4. I had one problem question which I couldn't solve, though I'm fairly
sure it should be possible:  Can we create a function that can have
privileges on an object that the person running the function does not
have?  The user wants to channel all updates through a validating
function; therefore users should not have insert, update or delete
privileges on the table, but they should be able to do inserts, updates
and deletes through this function instead.


Richard mentioned the rolling demo I had prepared.  This is attached.
It's quite extensive and Richard had suggested it ought to be trimmed or
broken into shorter sections, but I never found the time to do that.  My
intention was to cover, briefly, all the aspects of Pg that are
important to a prospective user.  At the same time, I felt the need to
educate people who don't really understand what a RDBMS is about.  If
people would like to contribute changes, I hope it will prove useful.
It is in OpenOffice format.

Oliver Elphick