{"id":553,"date":"2007-05-10T10:04:44","date_gmt":"2007-05-10T15:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/05\/10\/interview-with-bruce-momjian-founder-postgresql"},"modified":"2007-05-10T10:04:47","modified_gmt":"2007-05-10T15:04:47","slug":"interview-with-bruce-momjian-founder-postgresql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/05\/10\/interview-with-bruce-momjian-founder-postgresql","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Bruce Momjian (founder, PostgreSQL)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I found the recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.computerworld.com.au\/index.php?id=1472160102&amp;rid=-219\">interview<\/a> with Bruce Momjian (founder, lead architect, PostgreSQL) rather interesting. From it I took away:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PostgreSQL has stringent quality assurance. This is because there isn&#8217;t the &#8220;luxury of putting out a bad release&#8221;. He mentions that in the world of open source, there is zero tolerance for things that don&#8217;t work; I however can find many examples contradicting this line of thinking. Release engineering is largely dependent on humans and they do make mistakes.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;People are more confident with us that some of the commercial databases.&#8221; I believe this largely is how your company is run &#8211; tech-oriented or suit-oriented. Worse if you&#8217;re suit-oriented and largely public. Investors and upper management need to blame someone when things go wrong, and thats why support services are so great in the open source world. <b>Accountability is key<\/b>. The ability to fix customers problems is key. Going off on a tangent, Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell and OpenOffice.org hacker extraordinaire basically <a href=\"http:\/\/tuxdeluxe.org\/node\/184\">said<\/a>: <br \/>\n<blockquote><p><i>Ubuntu, claiming to ship and support OpenOffice.org, it&#8217;s a total joke &#8211; they have a part-time packager. At Mandriva, for example, the OpenOffice.org packager is a self-described &#8216;not a C++ programmer&#8217;. So how you can then go and say &#8216;we&#8217;ll support you&#8217;&#8230; Novell, at least, has people across the board working on the codebase, with a good understanding of lots of issues.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>Bruce mentions evolution &#8211; from stopping PostgreSQL crashing, to performance tuning, to enterprise features. He reckons that 8.2 is Enterprise Ready, and 8.3 and forward is going to include &#8220;revolutionary features that go beyond things you can&#8217;t do with other databases&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>My favourite quote:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;<b>If you look in the next five years, PostgreSQL will be a poster child for databases period<\/b>,&#8221; he said. &#8220;There is not really another database that&#8217;s enhancing at the speed of PostgreSQL, so what that would look like is hard to say.&#8221;<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>Pretty bold statement, eh? No roadmaps, like most open source projects. I actually think that&#8217;s a plus point, because roadmaps suit suits, but are completely inaccurate most of the time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a class=\"performancingtags\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/postgresql\" rel=\"tag\">postgresql<\/a>, <a class=\"performancingtags\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/interview\" rel=\"tag\">interview<\/a>, <a class=\"performancingtags\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/bruce%20momjian\" rel=\"tag\">bruce momjian<\/a>, <a class=\"performancingtags\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/michael%20meeks\" rel=\"tag\">michael meeks<\/a>, <a class=\"performancingtags\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/accountability\" rel=\"tag\">accountability<\/a>, <a class=\"performancingtags\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/database\" rel=\"tag\">database<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I found the recent interview with Bruce Momjian (founder, lead architect, PostgreSQL) rather interesting. From it I took away: PostgreSQL has stringent quality assurance. This is because there isn&#8217;t the &#8220;luxury of putting out a bad release&#8221;. He mentions that in the world of open source, there is zero tolerance for things that don&#8217;t work; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4vJD-8V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}