Re: Describing Postgres as "object-relational" on the home page

On 12/28/23 2:54 PM, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> To keep it simple:
> 
>    PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source, extendable,
>    relational database.  It has over 35 years of active
>    development that has earned it a strong reputation for
>    reliability, feature robustness, and performance.
> 

I'd be content with this (including extensible for now):

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source, extensible relational database 
with over 35 years of active development and a strong reputation for 
reliability, feature robustness, and performance.


> I like the idea of showing more of what PG can do:
> 
>    PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source, extendable,
>    relational database.  It is also, or has third-party
>    extensions to become, an object-relational, document/NoSQL,
>    temporal, spatial and geodesic, or vector database.
>    PostgreSQL has over 35 years of active development that
>    has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature
>    robustness, and performance.
> 
> Attached is a tar file of the home page (+CSS, etc.,
> as firefox saves it) with the above change, with new
> hyperlinks.  So you can (sorta) see what it looks like.

Thanks -- it's easier to make a diff from pgweb[1] to view, but I can 
understand that pgweb may be nontrivial to set up :(

I'd be open to adding another paragraph that discusses the capabilities, 
which is not dissimilar to what we do on the "About"[2] page:

https://www.postgresql.org/about/

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object%E2%80%93relational_database
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosql
> https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Temporal_Extensions
> https://postgis.net
> https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/what-is-pgvector
> 
> I don't know that off-site links to the various db type names
> is home-page-appropriate but it might help the beginner

> I added hyperlinks to (sorta) simple descriptions
> of the various db types.  I tried to stick with wikipedia
> but went to postgis.net and the pg wiki too.  I couldn't
> find anything on these go-to sites for pg_vector that has
> a simple overview describing the uses of a vector db,
> so settled on a commercial link. (Alternately, the
> wikipedia or wiki.postgresql.org vector database article
> could be given a better lead.  Or a patch sent to pg_vector
> that gives the README.md a non-technical "for what?".)
I'm a very strong -1 to off-site links from the homepage in this 
context. This is very valuable real-estate on the .org webpage and 
carriers heavy weight with SEO engines, so I'd strongly suggest we're 
careful with what we link to. That said, I'm not opposed to either 
expanding our own website or wiki to include more info on the above.

> It would be nice to link to pg_vector, as with the links
> to the other 3rd-party extensions, but I find it's home
> page too technical for the average person looking to find
> out what vector databases are for.

[disclosure: I contribute actively to pgvector]

I'd suggest we be careful which projects we call out as well. PostGIS 
has a long development and adoption history and is one of the well-known 
building blocks of geospatial applications. pgvector is newer and, while 
it's popularity has skyrocketed over the past year, there is still lots 
of active development going on in vector storage and retrieval both in 
and around pgvector, e.g. other projects may emerge as popular choices. 
This also brings up the question about how we treat projects that add 
typical database functionality to PostgreSQL that may not be extension 
per se, e.g. Patroni, pgBackRest, etc.

I'm not saying we don't have links to external projects that showcase 
PostgreSQL's extensibility, but I'd like to think through how we'd do 
that given putting such projects/links at the top of the homepage are a 
quasi-official endorsement.

> There is room, at least the way my browser window opens,
> for the extra text so that the layout does not change.

I think it's a good idea to talk about the types of 
functionality/workloads PostgreSQL can support, whether in core or 
extensions (geospatial, time series, vector/AI/pick-the-buzzword, 
distributed, etc.), and perhaps the starting point is adding that 
language that suggests that. We can then link to the wiki, perhaps make 
a "List of Extensions" page that's similar to "List of Drivers"[4] 
(which [4] is now linked to from the docs) that categorizes them. [5] 
has a nice starting point on the aggregation of what's out there.

Thanks,

Jonathan

[1] https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=pgweb.git;a=summary
[2] https://www.postgresql.org/about/
[3] https://www.postgresql.org/download/product-categories/
[4] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/List_of_drivers
[5] https://gist.github.com/joelonsql/e5aa27f8cc9bd22b8999b7de8aee9d47