4 ms·

i'm 100% sure that postgresql's goal was not to "make [their] technology attractive to a broad base". it was to create the best free rdbms they could.

• kjksf 16y ago
  The assumption is that those are mutually exclusive. I've been watching PostgreSQL development back in the days and to me it's clear that the biggest mistake PostgreSQL made was not responding to market demands as quickly as MySQL did. Windows support, built-in replication, built-in full-text search - those are all things that MySQL added much sooner than PostgreSQL. Those are also the features that people cared about and a big part why they were choosing MySQL over psql. At some point early lead turned into crushing defeat in terms of market and mind share. You can claim that some other features constitute "best free rdbms" but clearly PostgreSQL team does think that those are included in that definition since eventually they added all of them. The problem is that they did it long after MySQL had them. Too little, too late. The sad part is that it wasn't always a matter of coding but a matter of bad priorities and bad marketing (where I include defining what the product is and isn't as a fundamental part of marketing). For example, I believe psql had high-quality full-text search coded before MySQL did but the core team resisted shipping it by default. Instead for a long time a super valuable feature was part of "contrib" package i.e. you had to jump through hoops (like compiling it yourself) to get it to work. The main reason why PostgreSQL failed to MySQL was that the project was driven by extremely bright coders but terrible marketers.
  • blibble 16y ago
    Remember that PostgreSQL isn't run by a commercial enterprise, it's written by volunteers who as a general group couldn't care less about marketing, market share or what your business wants. For an rather more extreme example of this see OpenBSD, who basically say "if you want to use it go right ahead, but we build OpenBSD for our own use, not for your use."