The First Rule of Postgres Club

I had to chuckle when reading the comments of Alan Snelsons blog entry talking about PostgreSQL's project stability in the face of recent MySQL unsteadiness. Of course it shouldn't be a surprise that mentioning Postgres around MySQL people you might get some type of negative reaction. And vice versa of course. And with other db communities too, not just these two. But I digress. However what I really liked about the comments was this quote:

"PostgreSQL vs. MySQL is a non-issue for most people because the decision is already made. I don’t know what’s the point in bringing that up every-time, it shines a bad light on the postgres community."

The beauty here is that I found this blog post via Planet MySQL, not Planet Postgres. Further I've never heard of Alan Snelson; the post's author; he hasn't spoken at a Postgres event, and isn't syndicated on Planet Postgres. As far as I know, he just some guy who uses MySQL a lot, and now is looking at Postgres. Apparently he likes it and wants to spread the word. And of course people who don't like hearing about Postgres use this as a mark against the Postgres community, even when the Postgres project has nothing to do with it. You know software is no good when people who use it want to tell you how awesome it is!

In truth, that's how a lot of Postgres advocacy works these days. When you see people posting on slashdot, most of the time it's not from people working directly with the project. For those of us who have been using Postgres for a long time, we've long since got the message that MySQL users don't want to hear about Postgres. When I sat in the MariaDB feature request round table at the Percona Performance conference, listening to people ask for feature after feature that Postgres already has; partial indexes, index fillfactor, online ddl, extensible data types, dtrace probes, PITR, the list goes on; I didn't wave the Postgres banner. The only time I spoke about Postgres was when Monty had questions about Postgres' implementation. Some people asked me why I wasn't more vocal, why didn't I tell everyone about all the wonderful things that Postgres can do? What can I say... it's the first rule of Postgres club.