On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 03:59, Jan Wieck wrote:
> You can allways go the open source way and hire some developer who will 
> fix BLOB's shortcomings, contribute that to Postgres and then either 
> reopen the discussion based on the new functionality or have the same 
> developer continue working for you and contribute the BLOB support to 
> the Slony project.

Unfortunately the company is currently not hiring developers at all. We
are the same team for ~2 years now without changes... and in the last 5
years 2 developers left, 1 came. So unless we do it ourselves, no chance
for such stuff...

> That is BTW exactly how Slony-I came into existence. So this isn't meant 
> as a snippy comment but rather serious. I am working fulltime on 
> Postgres and Slony because the company I am working for needs these 
> things. We are not a software company, just a Postgres user. We 
> contribute all my work to the community because there might be other 
> Postgres users out there who have similar needs and can contribute 
> something in return.

That's pretty clear to me, and I would be glad to do some coding myself,
the problem is I only have experience using Java and postgres/slony are
C based, which is not appealing to me at all. I did some postgres
patches for our company which happen to work, but nothing complex, and
I'm not keen on learning more C. The biggest problem is not the language
itself, but the C tooling which looks pretty bad when you're used to
work with IntelliJ.

> It is important to understand that while Postgres and Slony are open 
> source products free of charge, they are not a free lunch. It is the 
> users responsibility to ensure that these products will continue to fit 
> their needs in the future. Funding developers to work on the specific 
> details you need is a good way to do that.

Well, that's not in my power. I'm just an executor here, the money is in
other hands. And I'm afraid it will be cheaper to work things around...

Cheers,
Csaba.