This year, they will be interviewing PG East attendees to create a Postgres user testimonial video. The community has not used videos extensively for marketing, partly because, while it is easy to create a video, it is difficult to create a good video. (Consider the quality of the average YouTube video.) Anyway, my guess is that the video will be something like this customer video. The video will be shared with the community to help promote Postgres worldwide.

First, PG East is shaping up to be a big conference:

• The conference agenda looks very full, with both developer and business-oriented talks. The business-oriented focus is rather new for Postgres conferences, and I think signals more mainstream adoption of Postgres.
• It is at the Warwick Hotel. This lobby photo should give you a good idea of how nice the hotel is — we will simply have to adjust to having a Postgres conference in a fancy hotel.
• Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research will be speaking. He is the person who authored last year’s Forrester Wave report that found Ingres and MySQL as the leading open source databases (news report). You can judge for yourself how much “research” went into that report, but we will be nice to him — a bodyguard will be unnecessary.

Registrations are now being accepted. There is a useful “Reasons to Attend” page that will help people who are undecided.

Second, it looks like I will be co-teaching a database class at Drexel University again this summer, but this time, a new, more advanced class that will highlight Postgres technology. Drexel wants to expand their database offerings and train skilled Postgres engineers. Postgres certainly offers students a unique opportunity to understand database technology.

The other interesting trend was the types of applications organizations are considering for use in the cloud. While there is much talk about replatforming existing application onto Cloud Computing infrastructures, many organizations seem to people getting their feet wet with new applications. They seem to be fairly traditional applications and not leveraging the elasticity of the cloud and they are just leveraging the financial benefits of not needed to procure new hardware. This trend show a lot of great promise for PostgreSQL given that Oracle does not have a favorable licensing model in virtualized environments. While Oracle is expensive in traditional environments, much of the cost benefits are eroded when Oracle is needed in a cloud environment. This is leading many people to open source solutions and PostgreSQL is a natural fit for many Oracle users.

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.

• 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.

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.

The Commission’s investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market.

This article, titled in part, “If MySQL fails, there’s always PostgreSQL”, puts it even more succinctly. I know many MySQL people worked very hard campaigning against approval, and I am sure they are disappointed by the outcome. Postgres users should thank them because even though they lost, their work has increased the visibility of all open source databases, including PostgreSQL.