Re: Dumping the banner ads

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Dave Page wrote:

>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org
>> [mailto:pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Josh Berkus
>> Sent: 10 May 2006 07:19
>> To: PostgreSQL WWW
>> Subject: [pgsql-www] Dumping the banner ads
>>
>> Marc, could you please acquaint us with the outstanding
>> obligations with the banner ads?  Whom have we promised what?
>>  Who will we owe refunds to?
>
> I cannot speak for the paid ones, but we have always offered our mirror
> providers a free ad - there certainly should be a few of those still in
> the system. We might find we cheese off a few of them by removing the
> ads.

Right now, we have active:

CommandPrompt    - Mirror/Free
EnterpriseDB     - Expires June 18th
ExtendDB         - Expires May 15th
Navicat          - Expires July 4th
Pervasive        - Mirror/Free
PgAdmin          - OSS Project/Free
Sam's Publishing - Exchange program for 'Show Books'

Navicat runs until July 4th, everyone else expires earlier then that ...
so we can scheduale dumping them on the 4th of July ...

Personally, the use of MySQL vs PostgreSQL for banner ads is 'using the
right tool for the job' ... Banner ads aren't "data integrity heavy", who
cares if you lose a click or impression here or there in the stats?

Just to put things into perspective ... the banners used to run on a 10
line, homegrown script that did nothing more then keep track of # of
impressions ... pg_autovacuum ran almost continuously on the one table
that did "UPDATE counter SET cnt = cnt + 1 WHERE banner_id = #" ... and
the counter table was purely "banner_id, cnt" ... switching over to
phpAdsNew allows ppl login to an interface and see extended statistics
like countries ppl are clicking in from, etc ... and performing better
then the '10 line script' did ...

As for Josh's comment about "switching to a mysql platform while we
weren't looking" ... nobody ever asked what the backend was ... everyone
was complaining that the banners weren't loading fast enough, so I fixed
that situation *while* extending the functionality of the system so that
more detailed statistics were being maintained ... and I wasn't going to
lie about what we were using ...

Matteo asked what we were using on -advocacy, and, IMHO, it would have
been suspicious if, after you pointedly asked me to confirm, the query
went un-answered ...

PostgreSQL is a steady workhorse, but there are at least 2 things that
I've found it doesn't do well: banner ads and bayesian database :(

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664