Re: A few NG related questions

Karsten Farrell <kfarrell_at_belgariad.com> wrote in message news:<MPG.19a4381399a459a598983b_at_news.la.sbcglobal.net>...

> > * I saw posting statistics posted from time to time. How are these
> > ststs generated? Is ORACLE Corp. somehow involved?
>
> One of the members of these NGs (the comp.databases.oracle... set) wrote a
> Perl program to extract those statistics.
>

Wow, how do you do that? Don't you have to have access to the News server? If I am accessing these messages through Google, I would not be able to generate that kind of stats, right?

> > * For people who have been in these NGs for a while, how has the
> > traffic to these NGs changed over the years? I heard somebody say the
> > traffic used to be much busier.
>
> Been here a while. Haven't noticed any major increase or decrease in the
> traffic. But I'm not sure what conclusions you can draw based only on the
> amount of traffic in a NG. The statistics you mentioned above show that
> sometimes some troll will anger a bunch of people and traffic will go up
> dramatically for a while. I don't think anyone would claim that the
> increase reflects an increase in quality.
>

My thinking was that amount of traffic is a good indicator of the popularity of a product. I don't think anybody can dispute that ORACLE is a much more powerful product than SQL server. But if more people visit SQL server NGs than ORACLE, and if more now than before, it kinda makes you wonder about the trend.
Kinda like the 'terror future market' put out by the Pentagon, well, sort of...

John Received on Wed Aug 13 2003 - 20:12:58 CDT