Trending PostgreSQL

In case you haven’t heard, Google has released a new service called [http://www.google.com/trends?q=postgresql Google Trends]. As with any new service, I thought I might take a swing and see what it might tell me about the world of PostgreSQL. 1. Our largest spikes in searches and news coverage have been driven by new corporations joining our community: This really shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Open Source projects are historically bad at interacting with “non-geeks” in the press, and the press is designed for interacting with corporate press departments. 4 of the six major articles highlighted came from 3rd party companies (Fujitsu, Pervasive, and Sun), with another tied to the announcement of 8.0 (and most importantly Win32 support) and the last article being a slashdot/digg driven frenzy written by my [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/1590595475&tag=zillablog-20&camp=1789&creative=9325 PHP and PostgreSQL 8] co-author Jason Gilmore. 2. We are big in Japan: I’ve heard a number of folks tell me this, but being so far away it doesn’t really sink in. Well, the top 4 cities in the world where PostgreSQL related searches are coming from are all from Japan. Other major cities include Krakow, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City; it’s notable that there are no cities in America on that list, and none from Western Europe. 3. We are big in a lot of “developing” countries: No surprise that, when aggregated by region, Japan leads the pack. But looking further you see Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, and Colombia. Again the United States and Western Europe don’t make the top 10. 4. I guess our foreign language support isn’t all bad: I’ve heard some people complain about PostgreSQL’s ability to handle foreign languages but given that english ranks ninth in searches broken down by language, there must be quite a bit of foreign language work being down; good news for all of the [http://www.postgresql.org/community/international foreign language community sites] that are supporting PostgreSQL. 5. I need to move! If you break down the searches by cities within the United States, you get San Jose, Salt Lake City, Santa Clara, Austin, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Portland, Denver, Pleasanton, and Cambridge. I suspect Austin is a new city driven by Pervasive’s presence, either [http://www.commandprompt.com Command Prompt] or maybe those [http://www.robbyonrails.com Ruby developers] are pushing Portland, and Tom Lane is probably single handedly keeping Pittsburgh on the map, but the most notable thing is that none of those cities are anywhere near Florida. Good grief! [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/wink.png alt=”;-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]