Bruce Momjian insufflated www.PostgreSQLFr.org

In the early 2000’s, the PostgreSQL Community was mostly organized on mailing-lists. The pgsql-fr-generale mailing-list had a great traffic at that time. I met then many new friends.

My job at this time, in that insurance company started to bore me out a bit. I was more and more involved into the PostgreSQL community, and specially, the French one.

In 2004, Nat Makarevitch, my former boss at IdealX, told me he wanted to resign from his role at Solutions Linux exhibit in Paris. We was then responsible of the “RDBMS Track”. A sort of 1-day conference, with Databases as a general theme. I accepted on the fly, and took that as an opportunity to have PostgreSQL better known in France.

Since I had no constraint at all to build up the program, I invited Bruce Momjian for Solutions Linux 2004, February 3-5, 2004.

Later on that day, we talked together. And I clearly remind our discussion:

• Hey JP… Does some sort of group of PostgreSQL people exists there in France?
• Well, not really.. Or rather.. The mailing-list “pgsql-fr-generale” is quite active. We’re quite a good number of people in there…
• No no.. I meant like a web site where people can exchange on PostgreSQL, etc?…
• No, that doesn’t exist..
• (Bruce pulls a face quickly.. that wasn’t the expected answer)
• Ok!… I understand

Bruce never asked me to do anything at that moment. I just directly tought about creating a website, like I was asked a sacred mission or such.

That discussion took place February, 5th 2004 in Paris.

Back at home, the next day, guess what I did:

$ whois postgresqlfr.org | grep -i creation
Creation Date: 2004-02-06T10:03:06Z

That website was hosted at home, I was lucky enough to be able to pay for my own RNIS line, that was stable enough. For the record, at this time, that was the only possibility to have a “permanent” internet connexion. All others where using the main analogic phone like to use a modem :-)

So I hosted the very first PostgreSQLfr.org website, on an OpenBSD box, because I always took security seriously, and also, because I could rely on my friend Loïc Cuguen here, as security expert, and BSD fan! Thank you again Loïc!

I announced the website creation on the pgsql-advocacy mailing list in this email on February, 13th 2024.

The main point of that website was to collect and publish usecases, because back in that time, the 2 main questions PostgreSQL fans had were:

• How does PostgreSQL compares to MySQL?
• (once convinced): Ok, PostgreSQL looks great but… who’s using it already in production?

That first question we had to answer it for about 10 years, from ~2000 to ~2010 or so…

The second one was just because people didn’t want to bet their production on such a “fresh RDBMS” (they didn’t know about where and and PG started.. don’t blame them :-)).

I had some succes, I were able to grab some few usecases and publish them. Unfortunately, biggest usages where hard to have. At that time, “big users” had “special contracts” with that RDBMS company you may known:

And they didn’t want to have those contracts at risk because they say something like PostgreSQL is great..

The website did quickly move from my static HTML version 1 to a version 2 in Drupal… This version lived for about 3 years, from about 2005 to 2008. I take the opportunity here to thank Betrand Yvain and Julien Ducros for the Lost-Oasis (now IELO) company in Marseilles at that time that hosted PostgreSQLfr.org (that became PostgreSQL.fr later) for free, and also Nicolas Niclausse, that just let us install Drupal (ahahaha) on an Open Brick server. Yes. You read well. Drupal, on a Open Brick Server. It was as big as a pack of 20 cigarettes. And a Geode processor :-)

And then the version 3 came up… And this is still the actual version of the website. This time, the machines where paid and given by Dalibo.

I take the opportunity here to deeply thank Guillaume Lelarge for all the work he did and still do for the PostgreSQL community, specially the hard work he did for years, and still does to translate everything PostgreSQL into French.

I remember the days we has waking up early to translate things before going to work, before Dalibo. If Guillaume has contributors helping, without him, we wouldn’t have such a succes in France and French speaking countries with PostgreSQL! I always been very impressed by the ton of work that represents. It is litterally many hundred pages of documentation. The PostgreSQLFr has that special area to display PostgreSQL documentation in French. Version 17 is 1154 pages long. The PDF represents 3238 pages !

By 2025, the admin team of the PostgreSQLFr I’m still part of will have to do a lot of work to upgrade things. We suffer a lack of time and energy to do it. But we all know we’ll have to do it anyways.

Thank you Bruce for the idea, despite, I must admit, it was a lot of work for us. But I think we are all proud of the results.