On Monday Josh Berkus requested suggestions for a new Postgres slogan. Our current slogan, “The world’s most advanced open source database”, was chosen in the early years of the project to distinguish ourselves from other open source databases, and it is easy to see why we should consider a change at this time. The suggestions fit into several categories, some serious, some humorous. Continued discussion is taking place on the advocacy (pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org) email list.

General

• PostgreSQL: The Elephant Never Forgets
• PostgreSQL: Enjoy Your Database Again
• PostgreSQL: The Professional Database Solution
• PostgreSQL: Meet the Future
• PostgreSQL: It Simply Works

Reliability

• PostgreSQL: Reclaim Your Database
• PostgreSQL: Because Your Data Is Worth It
• PostgreSQL: Setting the Standard For Following the Standard
• PostgreSQL: It’s ACID!

“Your”

• PostgreSQL: YourSQL
• PostgreSQL: Your Next Database
• PostgreSQL: Your Open Source Database
• PostgreSQL: Your Data is Important
• PostgreSQL: Your Data: Any time, Any Place

Open Source

• PostgreSQL: Free Forever
• PostgreSQL: Powerful Freedom
• PostgreSQL: Liberate Your Data!
• PostgreSQL: The ‘Open’ Open Source Database
• PostgreSQL: Open-Source Database, Open-Ended Possibilities

Humorous

• PostgreSQL: The Open Source Elephant Memory
• PostgreSQL: Even Better With Bacon!
• PostgreSQL: Less Complex Than Oracle (But That Doesn’t Mean Much)
• PostgreSQL: Duh
• PostgreSQL: We Won’t Be Bought Out
• PostgreSQL: Licensed To kill

Our Name

• PostgreSQL: Unpronounceably awesome!
• PostgreSQL: The most powerful software you can’t pronounce
• PostgreSQL: It’s OK to call it Postgres, just not Postgre
• Postgres: Who stole my QL?

Update: Here is a more complete list.

Based on recent discussions, I am wondering if Postgres is poised for a significant adoption increase in the next year. This is based on a few events:

• The upcoming Postgres 9.0 release, which I just blogged about
• The unstable economy, which is causing many companies to rethink their software spending practices
• The uncertainty surrounding other databases, both proprietary and open source

The last time Postgres appeared poised for another adoption increase was in 2005, with the release of PostgreSQL 8.0, when the native Windows port was introduced. I would say that release marked the point where Postgres became a respected open source database; prior to that we had a reputation of being slow and hard to manage. We had made changes for years before that, but the 8.0 release helped solidify our reputation.

The 9.0 release has the potential for Postgres to move from a respected open source database to a respected mainstream database, because, frankly, how many other databases are attracting new users at the rate we are? — very few.

Last week Dave Page announced that the next major release of Postgres will be numbered 9.0, rather than 8.5 as previous expected. This change was made because the next major PostgreSQL release will include built-in log-streaming replication, and that has always been considered a feature worthy of increasing the first version number.

While Postgres has had log-based replication support for a few releases, the 9.0 release will allow logs to be streamed to the slave using network transfer, which greatly increases the frequency at which logs can reasonably be sent. It also allows the slave server to accept read-only queries (hot standby), again a major feature addition.