jd's Journal: Has anyone had problems with DB companies? What therapies work with bosses?

I've been having problems with Enterprise DB. This company maintains the Windows port of Postgres, but I have been finding their customer service.... less than satisfactory. This is the second time in, oh, 21 years that I've actually been infuriated by a company. However, to be entirely fair to the business and indeed the sales person, it is entirely possible this was a completely freak incident with no relationship to normal experience. There were all kinds of factors involved, so it's a messy situation all round, but the hard-sell aggressiveness and verbal abuse went way beyond what I have ever experienced from a professional organization in two DECADES. What I want to know from other Slashdotters is whether this is about on-par with the tales of meteorites landing on someone's sofa (which is my personal suspicion) or whether it's a more insidious issue. Please, please, please, do not take one incident as a general rule. I've not seen any article on Slashdot or LWN reporting wider issues with them, which you know perfectly well would have happened had there been a serious, widespread problem. Especially with all of the reporting on database issues over recent times and the search for alternatives to MySQL once leading developers defected and major forks arose.

This is, however, a major question. Like it or not, we need databases we can rely on and trust, which means that when they are backed by companies, we need the companies that back them to be honorable. (PostgreSQL itself isn't owned, so I trust the engine itself just fine. The development team is very impressive - and, yes, I do monitor the mailing lists.) Value-added only has any added value if it's valuable.

What is worse, from my perspective, is that my current boss is now treating it like this is how companies work when reselling Open Source products. His practical experience was being on the receiving end of all this. If we're to take advantage of the freedom (and bloody high quality) provided in the Open Source world, I need to deprogram him of the notion that they give hassle and sell grief. Does anyone have any experience doing this?

Off topic

[Locke2005]

Care to comment on Lightfleet actually "selling" it's first box [lightfleet.com]? Running Windows, not Linux, of course.

Re:

[jd]

I've tried to avoid commenting on Lightfleet, as I like to respect the privacy of former employers. This policy of mine is something I adhere to strongly. However, I can make this comment primarily on knowledge acquired outside of the Lightfleet workplace, and need to use knowledge that was acquired either through work or later contact with employees only minimally to confirm points already made without such information.

Microsoft's "eXtreme Computing Group" (which received the box) did not even bother to pu

Re:

[Locke2005]

Wouldn't fast massively parallel multicast be useful for speeding up search engines, like for instance, Bing? Perhaps Microsoft sees this as a long shot that may someday help them compete with Google. Is the eXtreme Computing Group tasked with investigating potential new technologies for Bing?

Re:

[jd]

It might. If you can transmit N multicast streams simultaneously, of which any given node only belongs to M, then that node will receive M groups as though they had dedicated access to the network. The research groups that look like they'd be able to use this sort of technology are as follows:

• Data Management, Exploration and Mining (DMX) [microsoft.com]
• Databases [microsoft.com]
• Distributed Systems [microsoft.com]
• Hardware Computing Group [microsoft.com]
• Information Retrieval and Analysis [microsoft.com]
• Information Retrieval and Mining [microsoft.com]
• Internet Services Research Center [microsoft.com]
• Knowledge Tool [microsoft.com]