Dunslane Consulting

I created a small explosion yesterday. The object of my Philippic was an organization that my client ships data to. The data is XML and is generated out of Postgres using the XML facilities we introduced in version 8.3. The XML format being used is more than foul, but we have accomodated to that. However, these cretins said they couldn't process our XML because tags don't begin on a new line! This despite the fact that they had explicitly told me that it did not need to be pretty printed. After they told me that, a few weeks ago, I filtered the XML through a stylesheet to pretty print it.

Then yesterday thay came back with two more problems. First, a certain tag they were looking for had to begin in column 1 of its line. Second, they were unable to handle the sequence "
" in the data. These two things indicated such a degree of incompetence there that I just unloaded. An XML processor that can't handle escaped characters or requires tags to begin in certain line positions is just broken. These people are charging my clients vast sums of money to process the data, and the least the client might expect is some level of competence.

The staff at my client were very amused by my tirade. One guy there told another "We have to get Andrew to stop holding back on his feelings, and let us know how he really feels."

When I left the hedge fund I was working for a couple of years ago (boy, does that look like a good decision now), I decided not to seek full time employment any more but rather to try my hand at consulting, concentrating on PostgreSQL work. I formed a company Dunslane Consulting LLC and made my availability known to a few people. Since then I have managed to keep pretty steadily in work, without much effort. I've not had to go looking for work - it has tended to find me at just the right times.

However, the things you can do as a single consultant are limited. Some engagements require a number of roles, and for that I am often either technically or temperamentally unsuited (I have sworn never to work on a GUI again, nor on release management.) That's where PostgreSQL Experts Inc comes in. A number of people have got together to form this company, which is aimed at providing full service to PostgreSQL users, from setup to tuning to administration to application development. We have some people who are pretty well known in the PostgreSQL community, including Josh Berkus, our CEO, and David Wheeler and David Fetter, as well as your humble blogger, so we believe that potential customers will have confidence that they are getting the best when they come to us. Hence our name

Feel free to call me or Josh or any of our other consultants if you need more information. Or check us out at pgCon