Re: Linux ready for high-volume databases?

After a long battle with technology,khera@kcilink.com (Vivek Khera), an earthling, wrote:
>>>>>> "RJ" == Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
>
> RJ> Don't think of this as a troll, because I really don't know, even
> RJ> though I do know that MVS, OpenVMS & Solaris can.  (I won't even
> RJ> ask about toys like Windows and FreeBSD.)
>
> Well, you must be smoking something funny if you think FreeBSD is a
> 'toy' to be lumped in with windows....

I suspect your irony-meter didn't get activated when it was supposed
to.

Please keep in mind that to the sorts of people that read and believe
and act on the source article, any system that doesn't have a vendor
to "certify" its fitness for database use is manifestly a "toy" that
only fools and Englishmen would use for any purpose that was the
slightest bit important.

Your injection of technical fact into the matter just confuses the
matter for people that prefer to get their "technical expertise" from
some white-paper-writer at the Gartner Group.

And there is a very slight bit of genuine technical reality to this,
too.  People _assert_ that there are technical reasons to prefer
FreeBSD over other systems, but it is difficult to get forcibly past
the anecdotal evidence.  The fact that you have had a system running,
apparently quite successfully, for a while, is not a _proof_ that
FreeBSD is more or less satisfactory than other OSes for the purpose.
It is merely an anecdote.

Unfortunately, we seldom see _anything_ better than anecdotes.  People
report anecdotes that they heard that someone lost data to ext2.
Others report anecdotes that they have had good results with one
filesystem or another or one OS or another.

When there are problems, there isn't a good "certifiable" (or
'statistically significant') way of evaluating whether the faults
resulted from:
 a) A PG bug
 b) An OS filesystem bug
 c) An OS device driver bug
 d) Bad disk controller
 e) Bad disk drive

It's quite easy for these to feed into one another so that a severe
problem combines together a tragedy of errors.  (Been there :-(.)  Is
there a way to "certify" that the composition of your particular
hardware with FreeBSD with PostgreSQL can't lead to tragedy?  I'd
think not.

There's some pathos in with that irony...
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