After the recent events with Oracle licenses, my boss decided to do a
pilot project with moving an application to Postgres. So far, my
experiences are that we're talking a hippie scene here. EnterpriseDB
doesn't return calls, there are no major league companies using it and
NYC user group is lead by an EFF supporter who wants to "fight the big
media". It sounds almost like a case for the homeland security. There
will be a group meeting on November the 30th, maybe the threat level will
be elevated to purple with yellow polka-dots.



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Mladen Gogala wrote on 28.10.2009 21:53:
If you monitor the PG mailing list, you'll definitely get a different picture from the "scene".

Actually the tone and the knowledge on the PG mailing list is far better than in the Oracle forums...

Did you check the list of users on the PG website?
http://www.postgresql.org/about/users

Thomas

On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:22:53 +0100, Thomas Kellerer wrote:

Well, the tone on the Oracle forums is not a good thing to compare with.
Thanks for the list of users. As for the forums, which one would you
recommend? I came here because of the strong preference for forums which
are not moderated. Speaking about the hippie atmosphere....
To introduce myself, I am an Oracle DBA, since 1989, worked with every
major version of Oracle RDBMS since 4.1.4. Unfortunately, the licensing
policy of the Oracle Corp. was less than pleasing for my management which
decided to move some of our applications to an open source database. My
CIO was making up his mind between MySQL and Postgres when Oracle has
bought SUN and MySQL begun to fork. So, Postgres it is. I was able to
install it, load the data from Oracle (I am quite adept with Perl) and I
just wrote my first plpgsql function, all in two weeks.
The version that I am using is 8.3.8 and the platform is 32 bit Linux.



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Mladen Gogala, 29.10.2009 01:49:
As I said: the mailing list.
http://www.postgresql.org/community/lists/


They are mirrored on news.gmane.org if you prefer a newsgroup over a mailing list.

To be able to post through the newsgroup you still have to be registered on the mailing list, but you can register such that no emails are sent.


Regards
Thomas

I work in the computer department (~ 500 people) of the administration
of the City of Vienna (population ~ 2*10^6), and we have been using
PostgreSQL for several years now, mostly in smaller projects, but we
also have one enterprise critical application with a 300 GB database
on PostgreSQL.

I don't know if that counts as a reference for you.

Mladen Gogala wrote:
I guess you mean "hippie" as opposed to "serious".
Sure, a thread on pgsql-general sounds different from a Metalink
Service Request.

But in essence, the difference is not so great. If you know how to
ask a question and provide enough data that anybody can help you,
most likely somebody will. You don't have the guaranteed response time
of Oracle Support (whose performance is really great in my opinion, BTW),
but a polite "we can't reproduce it here" will help you just as much
as silence on pgsql-general.

I recommend the mailing lists, they *are* unmoderated.
the "general" mailing list is good for everything, from basic beginner's
questions to advanced things. I've no experience with the "admin" list,
but it's probably also a good starting point.
There is a variety of specialized lists, see
http://www.postgresql.org/community/lists/

You'll get support from users as well as developers on these lists,
in my experience all support levels are covered there.

I think PostgreSQL is a good choice for someone with an Oracle background,
that was one of the reasons we chose it.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:44:29 +0100, "Laurenz Albe"
<invite (AT) spam (DOT) to.invalid> wrote:

Seconded.

But I do miss synonyms, I haven't found their equivalent in PostgreSQL
yet, if they even exist, so full-name-qualifying of objects can be a
pain when they're organised across multi schemas but referenced in a
central function for example.

gargoyle60 wrote:
First, you can use a view that is just a simple SELECT * on the
original table. That's as good as a synonym.

If you need a replacement for a public synonym, create the view
in the "public" schema.

If you want to avoid this unpleasant bunch of objects, use the second,
PostgreSQL way: set "search_path" to include all the schemas you need.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

Laurenz Albe wrote on 29.10.2009 16:59:
I never liked Oracle's public synonyms, I'm glad Postgres doesn't have them.
They are the equivalent to a global variable in a programming language...

From my point of view, Postgres' concept of the schema search path is a lot better than the public synonyms because it allows a better control over what is being searched.

Regards
Thomas

Mladen Gogala wrote:
There are many large companies using Postgres. I took the EnterpriseDB
class this summer and one guy was from the United Nations in New York
using it. The other guy was from Boing Aircraft and I'm from Zions
Bancorporation.

I have a few smaller databases I either maintain or help with. There is
also a really big one (my baby) which is about a Terabyte with the
capacity to grow up to 5 Terabytes.

I have it running on a Sun 4500 series server running Solaris 10 in 64
bit. We're also running with openssl98k, R.2.8.1, plr 8.3.0.8 and
readline 6.0.0. All recompiled in 64 bit. Took awhile to figure how to
create a stable build. The EnterpriseDB and postgres.com packages for
Solaris were a problem. At least the 64 bit versions.

With 32 Gigs of RAM we definitely didn't want to go with 32 bit code :-)

So the short answer is yes, people are using it for serious stuff.

I also admin several Oracle10g databases. Both SE and EE. The more I
use postgres the most I'm liking it