ads' corner

• Bind/ISC presenting the upcoming version 10 of the bind software
• Wordpress/Buddypress (the guys offered to migrate Wordpress to PostgreSQL if i will use Wordpress for this blog)
• CAcert
• KOffice
• Perl (we established a good working relationship during FOSDEM and CeBIT and want to continue this)
• Mozilla
• EGEE
  

Together with help from Andreas Wenk, Joachim Wieland, Michael Meskes and Bernd Helmle we managed to have at least two people each day present at the booth - and this help was really needed. Although the booth was a bit offside, near the exterior wall of the hall and half behind another booth, we had a lot visitors all over the day. The feedback was really impressive. Top questions:

• "What are you thinking about the future of MySQL?" (Yes, this was the most common question) Heck, Oracle isn't saying anything about the MySQL future - how should we know?
• "How can I port my MySQL database to PostgreSQL?" Especially companies selling products based on MySQL are worried about the future of the database, if they can buy support or service in the next years - and how much it will cost them. Private users seem to take the chance and think about a database with a more stable background and development process.
• "How can I port my Oracle database to PostgreSQL?" Companies using Oracle right now are more and more scared by the licence costs for the database. Servers are growing, each new server has more cpus than the old one - and Oracle licence costs are linearly dependant.
• "Good database, continue the good work!" Many visitors came around to tell us, they are already using PostgreSQL and are happy with this decision.
• "What is the difference between PostgreSQL and MySQL/Oracle/DB2/SQL-Server?" The usual question. Would make sense to have a flyer explaining the differences.
• "How about Replication and/or Hot Standby, Load balancing?" - yeah, coming in the next version 9.0.
• "Can I have this sweet elephant?" The big elephant which was overlooking the booth, although the price is scary. Even security asked on the second last day.
• "What about this NoSQL databases like CouchDB?" Yeah, they do a good job and scale very well. But if it comes to complex queries, they can't compete.
  
• "What about data warehouse functionality?" Yes, we have some, more features will come in the near future.
  

Of course there were many more questions, sometimes visitors had to wait until we ended the talk with previous visitors. One or two more helpers would have been useful. CeBIT is not an Open Source event but instead only one hall was about Open Source. The event attracted 334.000 visitors from all over the world during the 5 day exhibition. The booth brought many visitors in touch with PostgreSQL who never heard before about this database or open source in general. During the workdays many visitors came from companies (small or big) or from authorities. The last day, a saturday, was more for private visitors.

I would like to thank all helpers (Andreas, Joachim, Michael and Bernd) and also Linux New Media for providing the booth, especially Britta Wuelfing for all the support in the run-up and during the event.