[Hamara-devel] PostgreSQL: the good, the bad, and the ugly

[shirish]

Hi all,

See https://lwn.net/Articles/645020/

TL;DR

the thing is PostgreSQL has been seeing lot of take-up of late and so it 
has been having the classical birth-pains of a growing community. Few 
years back it was about not having enough features, now it's about not 
having enough testing for all the features that are coming in and test 
all the use-cases, corner-cases etc. They have mentioned data-corruption 
in a recent release(PostgreSQL 9.3) which didn't get tested enough and 
they are still fixing some of the regressions which were in that release.

There was lot of discussions about one year release being good or not 
good enough with much more management issues with shorter releases than 
with longer releases (the same issues I had outlined when arguing for 
the Debian longer release cycle rather than Ubuntu's 6 months or even 3 
years).

One of the observations shared by one of the participant in the 
discussion that follows is that most end-users are loath to upgrade to 
newer versions of an RDBMS than it is say with a browser.

In my limited exposure to small businesses, I have seen the same, what 
perhaps is not articulated properly is that for small businesses, they 
are not really in a position to capture, learn and use all the features 
that an RDBMS might have.

I know of quite a few small businesses that do have the money to have 
another machine but do not have the funds to get a person to maintain 
the production RDBMS as well as have a test server where they can try 
out the newer version of the database.

They don't have much money while at the same time they need much longer 
release cycles than a medium business would have as they have enough 
resources apart from other issues.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org