In the post, Josh Berkus makes the assertion, "50% of PGX's active clients have either already converted to 9.0 replication or have scheduled a conversion with us".

I have no doubts of Josh's statement but it brings up an interesting point when arguing about features in PostgreSQL. Josh's response was in regards to a point made by Tom Lane that only a minority of our users are going to want replication. At this point people are going, "What? Of course we want replication!!!!" but you know what? You don't.

Yes, Command Prompt customers want replication. Yes, PostgreSQL Experts, EntepriseDB and OmniTI customers want replication. However, customers are *not* users. At least not in the community sense and the users in the community, the far majority of them do not need or want replication. A daily backup is more than enough for them.

I think we are going to see an increase in the disparity between customers and users as time goes on. I for example, do not see a real benefit to the 9.0 replication features. That is not to disparage the very hard work that the community members put in, just that we have already defined solutions to solve that problem, years ago. Solutions that work very well. I am more excited about things like SQL/med or PL/psm support.

Want to argue with Josh Berkus or I about this? Catch us at PostgreSQL Conference West next week.