June 23, 2015 at 3:13 pm
Your sales and marketing folks would have a better idea than I would in terms of the market opportunity for a PGSQL schema compare or a data compare. As a paying customer I was under the assumption that since there was an oracle version there would be a pgsql version. The $300 would be well spent on a PGSQL bundle. There might be an opportunity to generate monthly revenues through hosting providers. I'll take it anyway I can get my hands on it!
The number of top dba professionals who would participate from all over the planet might surprise you. PostgreSQL is picking up ground in some key areas. It would be great for people to be able to go to a site and get solid advice.
June 23, 2015 at 3:21 pm
emmchild (6/23/2015)
Your sales and marketing folks would have a better idea than I would in terms of the market opportunity for a PGSQL schema compare or a data compare. As a paying customer I was under the assumption that since there was an oracle version there would be a pgsql version. The $300 would be well spent on a PGSQL bundle. There might be an opportunity to generate monthly revenues through hosting providers. I'll take it anyway I can get my hands on it!The number of top dba professionals who would participate from all over the planet might surprise you. PostgreSQL is picking up ground in some key areas. It would be great for people to be able to go to a site and get solid advice.
You are correct. The only problem I might see is the climate of the community. Having worked in the Oracle world for a short time I was amazed at the lack of community in the Oracle world. I got more assistance here at ssc on the Working With Oracle forum threads than from many of the Oracle sites I visited. The SQL Server Community is so open and willing to share knowledge and assistance. If the PostgreSQL community resembles the SQL Server Community then a site like this one for PostgreSQL will probably flourish, but if it is more like the Oracle Community who knows.
June 23, 2015 at 3:28 pm
TomThomson (6/23/2015)
If that had happened on a large scale we would still be using hierarchic and network databases not relational.
Heh... it did happen on a large scale and we are using hierarchic junk all over the place... it's called "XML". :sick:
--Jeff Moden
June 23, 2015 at 3:30 pm
Postgresql is written by the community. The challenge is finding a user friendly site like this one to get your feet wet. The majority of my Sql Server knowledge comes from ssc. Having a pgssc site would be awesome! It could even be a youth movement catering to high school , college, and recent college grads who like to hack on databases.
June 24, 2015 at 1:31 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (6/23/2015)
emmchild (6/23/2015)
Steve it would be awesome to have RedGate tools for Postgresql. It would be awesome to have a Postgresql Server Central site. I would be willing to pay for the former and actively participate in the later.It's been debated, and still is. Not sure there's a market that works here. Even the MySQL tools don't do well as apparently many companies expect them to be free.
In terms of a site, I've thought about it. I don't have enough contacts or knowledge to run it completely, but I wouldn't mind pressing into some other area and seeing if I could get people to participate. The hard part is getting people to register to ask and answer questions and also read articles. The growth of the site, and value in some part, depends on having a vehicle like a newsletter that provides some benefits to the owner.
I'll kick it around a bit more.
I wonder how many of the MySQL developers/dbas who want the free tools are working in companies that give their own products away for free? Always great to see them get Free ( as in price) mixed up with Free (as in freedom ).
For running the site for Postgress, MySql et al do you need the expert knowledge yourself? This site to my mind if more professional than StackOverflow which seems to based on sycophants and populous beliefs rather than facts.
June 24, 2015 at 4:05 am
Labour shortage is a myth. Offer a very good salary (I'm talking 6 figures) and then you'll see how many great applicants you'll get.
June 24, 2015 at 7:07 am
TheComedian (6/24/2015)
Labour shortage is a myth. Offer a very good salary (I'm talking 6 figures) and then you'll see how many great applicants you'll get.
With the interviews that I've done in the last couple of years, I have to strongly disagree. While there is no shortage of labour or applicants, there a huge shortage of people that actually have any skill at what they apply for. I've had DBAs and Developers apply that quite literally didn't know how to get the current date and time using T-SQL never mind doing something average like a native backup and restore or create a 3 table joined SELECT. And I'm talking about supposedly senior DBAs and Developers that claim more than 10 years of experience. The DBAs that claim "tuning" experience have been an absolute joke. None of them, save one, have been able to come even close to properly describing a Clustered index never mind the interaction it has with non-clustered indexes.
--Jeff Moden
June 24, 2015 at 12:07 pm
Jeff Moden (6/24/2015)
TheComedian (6/24/2015)
Labour shortage is a myth. Offer a very good salary (I'm talking 6 figures) and then you'll see how many great applicants you'll get.With the interviews that I've done in the last couple of years, I have to strongly disagree.
Ditto. I've seen plenty of good jobs, but few candidates.
The number of applicants can have little to do with the quality, which means a shortage of valuable, or useful, help.
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June 24, 2015 at 1:12 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (6/24/2015)
Jeff Moden (6/24/2015)
TheComedian (6/24/2015)
Labour shortage is a myth. Offer a very good salary (I'm talking 6 figures) and then you'll see how many great applicants you'll get.With the interviews that I've done in the last couple of years, I have to strongly disagree.
Ditto. I've seen plenty of good jobs, but few candidates.
The number of applicants can have little to do with the quality, which means a shortage of valuable, or useful, help.
Indeed. I found it even worse looking for C++ developers - people with lots of (worthless) paper qualifications and 10 years experience as a coder with no real design responsability don't qualify for a role as a programmer or a software engineer, but these people had been given fancy job titles (instead of assistant programmer or trainee programmer or technical clerk they were senior programmers or principal software engineers) and were applying for jobs that they hadn't a chance of being capable of doing. I found the same sort of thing with other mainstream things (C, SQL, Fortran) but quite different for the more esoteric stuff (S3, Hope, and such). And of course it's a fairly new problem - when I was first recruiting developers and customer support people I wasn't expecting to get anyone with any relevant experience, because the industry was too new.
Tom
June 25, 2015 at 7:25 am
We had a new programmer talk us into using a complex tool set for a rewrite we were doing. After we got well into it, way to far to pull out, he left. Finding replacement programmers is difficult as not one uses it.
June 25, 2015 at 7:42 am
Iwas Bornready (6/25/2015)
We had a new programmer talk us into using a complex tool set for a rewrite we were doing. After we got well into it, way to far to pull out, he left. Finding replacement programmers is difficult as not one uses it.
Ok... you've got my curiosity up. What is that tool set?
--Jeff Moden
June 25, 2015 at 8:15 am
As a bit of a sidebar, this is why I'm sometimes considered to be a bit of a Luddite. Everyone, especially new front-end developers but not limited to just them, has their "pet" tools.
I worked at one place where a system to import CSVs that were created from what appeared to be spreadsheets to download and import "spotlight" information from Double-Click.net used (it was a while ago) a combination of DTS, DOS, Active-X, Perl, T-SQL, and some other damned thing that I can't remember to "do" the job of importing (the downloads where equally as horrible). Very long story made shorter, it was taking 45 minutes just to get one file (usually about 30K rows up to 800 columns wide) ready for import never mind actually importing and validating the data.
It was a REAL problem because even with a dozen "import' jobs running in parallel, the system was falling behind because they downloaded hundreds of these files each day. The trouble was that no one could make repairs to the system because of the "Tower of Babel" code that had been written over time by multiple "developers" not actually qualified to even spell "import".
When they asked me to take a look at it, I only got about 30 minutes into the analysis before I decided that none of it was worth saving. I rewrote the whole import shebang using only T-SQL and got it down to doing the actual full-up import and validation so that we were doing 8 files every 2 minutes. That was just the first blush code. I saw other opportunities to make it even faster (to handle future expansion of business) but they decided that was good enough.
The good part is that I left them with code (and, of course, embedded documentation) that anyone that actually knew a little about T-SQL could figure out the code and they didn't have to have experience in all of the "tools" the others had left behind in a "Tower of Babel".
That's all brings me back to the original subject of "Skill Supply and Demand". As I've said, I've interview a bunch of people for various positions that claim more than 10 years of experience with SQL Server and T-SQL. I've forgotten the exact counts but out of more than 20 candidates, 80% didn't know how to even get the current date and time using T-SQL never mind any real knowledge about indexes of how to write some stupid-simple T-SQL. Their resumes make them sound like they walk on water, though. And these interviews were all for senior positions that paid serious amounts of money as someone previous suggested.
To wit, there's definitely no shortage of candidates and so the "labor" shortage isn't real but that's not all there is to it in this business. Between the interviews I've done and the questions being asked on this and other forums by people that have jobs where they supposedly know what they're doing, I'm here to tell you that there is a major shortage of people that have any skill at all especially when it comes to database. That makes for a huge "labor" shortage.
There another serious shortage that goes along with the apparent lack of skills. We've all seen it, too, and that would be a huge shortage of both intellectual curiosity and attitude. For example, it's totally amazing to me that a person that has been a Systems DBA for more than 10 years has absolutely no clue of how to do a native backup never mind a restore (a couple of the supposedly Sr. DBAs that I interviewed) and a handful of people claiming extreme success in tuning of stored procedures that could not correctly define what a clustered index was nor how they had a powerful impact on NCIs. As I said before, one of them even told me that he'd never worked with clustered indexes before because he'd never had to work with clustered servers before.
--Jeff Moden
June 25, 2015 at 8:41 am
TheComedian (6/24/2015)
Labour shortage is a myth. Offer a very good salary (I'm talking 6 figures) and then you'll see how many great applicants you'll get.
Isn't that the point we want to avoid? I mean, anyone can recruit rockstars if you have the cash. That doesn't make it smart business nor something you should strive to do with your technology.
June 25, 2015 at 9:48 am
Check out http://www.meetup.com/pg_atl/. Everyone one is encouraged to contribute. It's really a good mix of newbies and seasoned veterans. A site that encouraged that same sort of participation would be awesome.
June 25, 2015 at 10:01 am
@jeff you have triggered post traumatic stress!
I too have suffered a load process that took 10 minutes to loai 3000 records.
What hurt was that I used SSIS to load the full dataset before we committed to buying the dataset. The developer was a Senior dev in a team of consultant developers. He argued that in his opinion drag and drop tools don't work. It took me 10 minutes to write the package and run it and confirm that the data was as expected.
The consultant burnt a two week iteration on his non-solution. His process was accepted and the DBAs got a kicking because the performance problems were obviously due to the limitation of the DB And competencies of the DBA.
The fact that the DBAs routinely load million row datasets in under 1minute was blithely ignored. Oh to meet that fool down a dark alley! I suspect that I'd be in a queue
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