PostgreSQL and its increasing popularity

So i had just another PostgreSQL course at the LinuxHotel in Essen. As always, i enjoyed working there with people interested in learning PostgreSQL within a very nice atmosphere. The reason i'm blogging about this, is that i'm really impressed how PostgreSQL has gained momentum over the last three years.

Doing such courses a few times a year at the LinuxHotel and getting regular feedback from attendees, i noticed that PostgreSQL has reached various places in the german industry and administration. Its used in ERP, Inventory Control, Data Warehouses, Webapplications, Information Retrieval. Often PostgreSQL serves mission critical applications, sometimes its used to implement a satellite system along with some other proprietary product. In many installations this was the entry key for PostgreSQL at all, since this allowed people to get their experience with PostgreSQL in a production environment without a radical change. They used this opportunity to build up their knowledge and infrastructure they need to run PostgreSQL as a backend for their applications and to recognize its reliability and stability. There are examples out there, where PostgreSQL finally replaced the main system afterwards.