laurenz_albe

PostgreSQL itself doesn't hire anyone. The trade mark is owned by the "PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada" (https://www.postgres.ca/), which does not hire people or engage in commercial activity. It's just there to protect the name.

There is a PostgreSQL core team (https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/) that is a kind of steering committee, but does not make decisions concerning development. It consists of people from different companies.

The people who develop PostgreSQL are mostly hired by companies that have a commercial interest in the database and usually sell consulting, support, training, products that need PostgreSQL and customized closed-source forks of the database software.

There is no single authority in the PostgreSQL project. Decisions are made in mailing list discussions, cumbersome as that may be. The ultimate authority over the code is wielded by the committers (https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers), which are highly trusted core developers who work for different companies. Development is slower than it might be with a single central authority, but that also part of the reason for the high software quality that PostgreSQL is known for.

This seems to be unfounded criticism. When statistics are gathered, PostgreSQL samples a certain percentage of the table, so that obviously scales. The number of "most common values" and histogram buckets scales up to 10000, which should be good even for large tables. While I'll readily admit that not all aspects of cross-column dependencies are dealt with, and cross-table distributions are not considered, that has nothing to do with size. I guess you hit a problem somewhere, couldn't solve it and jumped to unwarranted conclusions.

That is not what "they" are saying. count(1) and count(*) are equally fast because they are doing the same thing.