PostgreSQL: More Traffic than MySQL (and a first Google spotting)

When we announced back in December we'd loaded the MySQL database mailing lists, we heard from several people who asked us to load the PostgreSQL lists also. We said we'd be happy to, and MarkMail now has 635,000 PostgreSQL emails loaded and searchable.

Comparing PostgreSQL and MySQL is kind of interesting. With all the talk about the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-Perl-Python) architecture you'd think MySQL had a lock on the open source database market, but based on simple message traffic analytics, PostgreSQL has a much higher level of community involvement. Looking at January 2000 onward, the MySQL lists have amassed 340,000 messages with about 3,000 new messages each month:


In the same time period, the PostgreSQL lists have hit 583,000 messages with 7,000 new each month:


I wouldn't have thought it, but there it is.

Also in the PostgreSQL lists we find the very first mention of Google in all of the messages loaded so far! The first Google sighting was on the pgsql-interfaces list, January 28, 1999, in a post by James Thomson:

"I've been using the Oracle Pro*C precompiler manual. I don't have the URL here at work but I found an online copy using www.google.com"

The first mention in another community happened on the xml-dev list a couple months later, March 10, 1999, in a post by Andrew McNaughton:

"You need a new search engine. I've recently been using www.google.com with results an order of magnitude better than what I got from altavista (though altavista still has it's place for more complex query definitions)."

Here's the query if you want to look for yourself:

http://markmail.org/search/google+order:df


Maybe as we load more community archives we'll get even earlier sightings.