Re: New server to improve performance on our large and busy DB - advice? (v2)

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:35:53 -0600
Dave Crooke <dcrooke(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> For any given database engine, regardless of the marketing and support
> stance, there is only one true "primary" enterprise OS platform that
> most big mission critical sites use, and is the best supported and
> most stable platform for that RDBMS. For Oracle, that's HP-UX (but 10
> years ago, it was Solaris). For PostgreSQL, it's Linux.

I am interested in this response and am wondering if this is just
Dave's opinion or some sort of official PostgreSQL policy. I am
learning PostgreSQL by running it on FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE. So far I
have found no problems and have even read a few posts that are critical
of Linux's handling of fsync. I really don't want to start a Linux vs
FreeBSD flame war (I like Linux and use that too, though not for
database use), I am just intrigued by the claim that Linux is somehow
the natural OS for running PostgreSQL. I think if Dave had said "for
PostgreSQL, it's a variant of Unix" I wouldn't have been puzzled. So I
suppose the question is: what is it about Linux specifically (as
contrasted with other Unix-like OSes, especially Open Source ones) that
makes it particularly suitable for running PostgreSQL?

Best,
Tony