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Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by speedgoose on Sunday June 25, 2023 @01:59AM (#36465451)
I don’t know your requirements but wouldn’t using software containers with a reproductible operating system (like nix), or even a simple image like Debian PostgreSQL, fix the predictability problem?
Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by dogma1138 on Sunday June 25, 2023 @07:16AM (#36467023)
No, at least not in a heavily regulated industry because then other obligations e.g. patching become a much bigger issue.

The big benefit of MSSQL and Oracle SQL is that your database server is almost completely detached from the operating system the likelihood of a system update changing how your database works is nill. With Postgres and other databases it’s not a given. Ironically on Windows you get to extract quite a bit of that back since Postgress on Windows comes with most of its own libraries, however that’s also part of the problem where you can easily have material differences between running Postgress on Windows and Linux.

Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by speedgoose on Sunday June 25, 2023 @11:47AM (#36469458)
I don’t know about your industry but patching and software containers aren’t incompatible from my point of view.

I am guessing that you don’t want to validate PostgreSQL on all operating systems, but you could always stick to one using software containers.

Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by dogma1138 on Sunday June 25, 2023 @04:06PM (#36472063)
Containers don’t solve anything, it’s not that the base image doesn’t need to get patched.

Postgres is far more dependent on OS libraries which makes it far less predictable.

Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by speedgoose on Monday June 26, 2023 @01:32AM (#36476054)
Alright, but if you need to patch a dependency of the database does it matter whether the change is in a shared library or not?

Of course you could skip patching the dependencies and ship unsafe software the oracle db way.

Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by dogma1138 on Monday June 26, 2023 @04:56AM (#36477366)
Yes, MSSQL for example is self contained OS or container image updates aren’t going to impact it or at least it’s extremely unlikely that they will.

Postgres is dependent on a lot of OS level C libraries that can materially change how things work.

This means that there will have to be more testing with Postgres and there will be higher uncertainty between different deployments.

All of these can be mitigated and for many organizations the benefits of Postgres might outweigh these downsides but they do exist.

Re:AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Compu... by albertopv on Friday June 30, 2023 @09:25PM (#36545243)
Things are not carved in stone, we had to change the OS and something quite unforeseeable for a RDBSM happened. Imho DBMS should be a sort of self sufficient OS in itself.