Re: Is my lecturer wrong about PostgreSQL? I think he is!

Greetings,

First off- please try to craft a new email in the future rather than
respond to an existing one. You may not realize this but there's some
headers that get copied when you do a reply that cause the email to show
up as being a reply, even if you remove all the "obvious" bits from it.

* Pól Ua Laoínecháin (linehanp(at)tcd(dot)ie) wrote:
> 1) Is my lecturer full of it or does he really have a point?

He's full of it, as far as I can tell anyway, based on what you've
shared with us. Just look at the committers and the commit history to
PostgreSQL, and look at who the largest contributors are and who they
work for. That alone might be enough to surprise your lecturer with.

> 2) The actual concrete acknowledged problem with fsync that affected
> PostgreSQL - why didn't it affect Oracle? Or MySQL? Or did it but it
> was so rare that it never became apparent - it wasn't that obvious
> with PostgreSQL either - one of those rare and intermittent problems?

Databases that do direct I/O don't depend on fsync. That said, I do
think this could have been an issue for Oracle if you ran it without
direct i/o.

> 3) Were there ever any problems with BSD?

As I understand it, no.

> 4) What is the OS of choice for *_serious_* PostgreSQL installations?

BSD and Linux are both quite popular platforms for running PG, and
people run very serious workloads on both.

Thanks,

Stephen