Re: Wisconsin Circuit Court Access (WCCA) on

>>> On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at  2:08 am, in message
<1142323733.11178.15.camel@localhost.localdomain>, Simon Riggs
<simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006- 03- 13 at 13:27 - 0600, Kevin Grittner wrote:
>> Even more important is the fast response we have had when posting
>> problems to the lists.  We have normally had a fix within 24 hours.

>> Frankly, the support has been amazing.
>
> Kevin, well done. We've all watched your progress with interest.

Thanks to all who have offered congratulations.

> The reason you've got excellent support is because of the detailed
> postings you've made, together with responses to all replies. Doing
all
> your homework before posting is essential; unfortunately many people
> don't do this and then leave disappointed.

Here I think you underestimate how well the community helps people in
these lists.  I have witnessed remarkable patience here when people post
vague messages asking for help.  You (as a community) generally succeed
in drawing out sufficient detail to provide good advice, and / or
identify areas for product improvement.  I do try to give as much
information as I can, including reproducible test cases where
practicable; but, I have done so with commercial vendors to whom my
clients have paid big money for support, and been very disappointed.

With one commercial vendor we've routinely been told by first line
support staff that the product was functioning as intended.  After days
of effort, sometimes involving calls from top management, we've gotten
through to someone who can actually understand the problem and
acknowledge the bug; only to have it take months (sometimes over a year)
to get a fix,

With another open source vendor, from whom no support is available
without a paid license and a paid support contract, we (after paying for
a commercial license and a support contract) have been told that such
things as using an OR predicate within the ON clause of a JOIN was an
"unimplemented feature" (even though it worked in simple cases).  They
said they might "add the feature" in the next major release, but that
wouldn't be for at least a year, and no guarantees.

It was unexpected and quite refreshing to provide the same level of
detail in a post to a PostgreSQL list, and get a patch file fast enough
to be running a fixed version within 24 hours of posting the problem.
When we have been able to provide sufficient detail and / or a test
case, this has usually been the result.  When we participated in the
beta test phase, people were quite helpful in leading me through the use
of unfamiliar tools to capture the information they needed to identify
and fix problems before the official release.

After decades of working as an independent consultant, I've recently
(eight days ago) accepted employment with the Wisconsin Court System as
a DBA, and I'm told that as a court employee I'm not allowed to endorse
one product over another; but, I can speak of my experiences with
products so long as I don't violate any constraints of the license
agreements.  I have worked with quite a few database products in my
career and can say unequivocally that the support I've seen provided for
PostgreSQL is superior to that which I've seen provided for any other
database product.

I don't want to name any names, because I would undoubtedly forget
several very helpful people here, but I have to admit that my personal
favorite was when I posted information about a bug in the JDBC driver
shortly before I left for the day, and while I was sleeping a user in
Germany created a program to cause the race condition, tracked down the
cause, and posted a patch with a suggested fix.  By the time I'd
finished my coffee the next morning, the patch had been reviewed, scaled
back to the minimum change required to effect a fix, applied to CVS, and
a new jar file deployed for download.  Wow.

I can't really accept congratulations for this successful deployment
without offering it right back to the community for all the help you've
provided, as well as the product itself.  Absolutely fantastic, all
around!

-Kevin