On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 04:37:23PM +0100, Alex Stapleton wrote: > Release a cheaper / free alternative and people will use it because > they will have almost no reason not to. This means that cheaper and > as good as does have a place in the market even if it's not a > conventional solution. It just needs evidence and evangelism. The > current market should not be the principal target. I agree with this; but I'm always concerned about something that's _almost_ as good as the competition, but not quite there, being pointed at as being "as good as" the competition. That way lies an invitation to the point-and-laugh responses that MySQL's so-called cluster system has garnered: it's too dangerous to use for many systems where the data is important enough, because the failure mode is "near-complete catastrophe". See another thread, where I talk about the strategy some companies may be using of lumping PostgreSQL in with other products, and then attacking the other product. Irrelevance may be fallacious, but it makes for depressingly successful marketing. A -- Andrew Sullivan | ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx A certain description of men are for getting out of debt, yet are against all taxes for raising money to pay it off. --Alexander Hamilton ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match