I’ve been using PostgreSQL for about a decade now, and when I first started, I thought, “I’m only gonna be a Postgres user, not a teacher. I’m never gonna blog, stream, or teach about what I learned along the way. I’m gonna focus on the Microsoft side.”
Over time, I just really fell in love with the simplicity and power of Postgres. It’s more than good enough for the vast majority of database apps out there, and it’s really hard to beat the price.
But during my learning journey, I hit the same barriers with Postgres that I’d hit with SQL Server back in the 2000s. Most of the training material was boring, dry, and theoretical – like it was written by college professors who’d never worked for a fast-paced dot-com or watched a TikTok video.
So eventually I decided to launch training classes, just to boil down the most important stuff what I’ve learned into short, fun, easily approachable stuff.
I decided to call it Smart Postgres.
I never really was consistent about whether or not I used a space between those two words. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have used a space, because you don’t wanna use spaces in domain names anyway – I should have just named the whole thing SmartPostgres.com.
Well, that’s not true either: I shouldn’t have used the word Postgres at all.
Because even though the database is open source, the names Postgres, PostgreSQL, and the elephant logo (Slonik) are all trademarked by the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada. That trademark page is beautifully straightforward, too – they do a great job of explaining where you’re allowed to use the names, and where you’re not, including this simple line:
Do not use the marks in a business name or trade name.
Well, duh. I should have known better, and I’m disappointed that I didn’t think to check that. (sigh) I didn’t figure it out until I tried to get this blog syndicated by Planet Postgres. They took literally months to go through the syndication process, and finally told me no, you can’t use that name. (sigh again) Totally my fault – I just wish this would have happened earlier so that I could have done the renaming/rebranding earlier.
So… now I gotta figure out what to rebrand to! If you’ve got ideas, feel free to drop ’em in the comments.
16 Comments. Leave new
SmartPgDba.com ?
son of ingres
Singress?
Perhaps “Smart PG” ?
Now you know why they came up with the very inventive company name “Enterprise DB” to license Postgres.
PGSpeed
NotSqlServer
Ok I have 2 approaches I would go in 2 directions at the same time.
BrentOzarPG.com this aligns with your current naming and likely will make it a breeze for us corporate/government types to get approval with something similarly named to our current training sites.
ElephantPGTraining.com as this is playful and allows you to kind of put it like it is, the elephant in the room, another databases that will likely take over from where Oracle/SQLServer have left off.
Perhaps pgSmarts.com or pgBrights or (rhymes with Brent) with the camel case? PG just soudns parental guidance idk.
pgBrillant??
SmartPstgrs
pgUnlimited?
PG++ (https://pg-plus-plus.com)
SmartPostg{redacted}
smart.databases is available.
nope, that’s a copy/pasta error. theres no databases tld, unless you want to buy it. Lemme try that again…
It’s like twitter. No edit button.
SmartDatabases.co is available.