Message-ID: <408BC34F.8020607@itsbeen.sent.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 06:55:27 -0700
From: Rob <pgadmin@itsbeen.sent.com>
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To: pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] What can we learn from MySQL?
References: <200404230409.i3N49jC02890@candle.pha.pa.us>
	<17951.24.91.171.78.1082752617.squirrel@mail.mohawksoft.com>
	<20040424171001.GA19570@wolff.to>
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Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 16:36:57 -0400,
>   pgsql@mohawksoft.com wrote:
> 
>>Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions that address this are
>>ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the functionality is the primary
>>concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is VERY important. You guys
>>need to remember, people are coming from a world where MySQL, Oracle, and
>>MSSQL all have nice setup programs.
> 
> 
> "nice" must be in the eye of the beholder. I have used Oracle's installer
> to install a client and was not amused by it need hundreds of megabtyes
> to do a client install.

I have to agree, I've installed DB2, Sybase, Oracle, Informix, 
BerkeleyDB, mySQL, postgreSQL and others.

IIRC, I believe postgreSQL was the shortest from download to running 
system (when compiling the OS ones from scratch) and seemed to do the 
most thorough testing of itself.

Oracle doesn't seem to give you the option to not install the hundreds 
of megs of documentation on the Nth machine where you just needed the 
damn client lib - less of an issue now than in the smaller 
disk/partition days.

But I think there is room to go further, I don't see any reason why that 
default install can't include example DBs, sample maintenance scripts, 
etc. One nice thing to have would be a sample DB with the scripts 
necessary to spin up a test/demo DB with a size of X megs. Whenever I 
started with a new DB system, I wished I didn't have to ramp up on a 
bunch of topics before I was able to build a set of scripts to generate 
and populate a sizable testing db. There is a big psychological factor 
if you can install something, type one command and have a db with 
250,000 records to start playing with.