21:38

Users Want Functionality, Not Features

27 October 2010

Over at the Command Prompt blog, Joshua Drake makes a (probably deliberately) provocative point about “users” not wanting replication, as opposed to “customers” who do. I’ll confess I’m not 100% sure about his distinction between “users” and “customers,” so I’ll just make something up: Users are the people sitting in front of the application, entering data, buying shoes, or doing whatever it is that the database enables; customers are the CIOs, CTOs, Directors of Engineering, and the other people who make purchasing decisions.

He writes:

Yes, Command Prompt customers want replication. Yes, PostgreSQL Experts, EntepriseDB and OmniTI customers want replication. However, customers are not users. At least not in the community sense and the users in the community, the far majority of them do not need or want replication. A daily backup is more than enough for them.

Well, yes, as far as it goes, he’s absolutely right. Users don’t need or want replication. They don’t need or want PostgreSQL, for that matter; VSAM, flat files, or a magic hamster would be fine with them, too, as long as the data that comes out is the data that goes in.

But for how many users, really, is “It’s OK if you lose today’s data, gone, irretrievably, pffft, yes?” really an acceptable answer? Very few. Very very few, and getting fewer all the time. One of the strongest pushes behind moving services into the “cloud” (i.e., external hosting providers of various kinds) is that they provide near-constant recovery and fault-tolerance. Users don’t care if their data is protected by hardware-level solutions like SANs, or software-level solutions like replication, as long as it is protected.

Users who profess not to care about this are either not putting authoritative data into a database, or just haven’t had the inevitable data disaster happen to them yet.

For me, the biggest feature of PostgreSQL’s 9.0 replication is that it is much, much easier to set up than any previous solution. Slony is a heroic project, and has lots of happy customers using it extensively, but it is notoriously fiddly and complex to set up.

Like a lot of technologies, replication hasn’t been a demand for a lot of PostgreSQL implementation because the cost didn’t seem worth the payoff. 9.0 brings the implementation cost way, way down, and thus, we’ll start seeing a lot more interest in putting replication in.

Of course, do the daily backups, too.

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