Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmpk2k | Hacker News Reader

On a tangent: I think it's rather sad that many nerds aren't prepared to try a different UNIX, when we're talking the lifeblood of their business: data.

ZFS is the only filesystem it's reasonable to trust critical data on right now (I can't think of any other OSS self-validating Merkle trees that have been hammered in production for nearly a decade...), yet somehow some minor differences in Unicies trumps that.

I'm going to make a bold claim I know will stir the nest, but I feel confident in making given all the bad shit most filesystems miss: if you're not running your OSS RDBMS on ZFS right now, and you don't have compelling specialized needs to explain why not, you shouldn't be let near a production DB due to plain negligence and/or incompetence.

View on HN

It depends on how you slice it. If your expertise in this system is less than your others, it could cause real problems down the line. If a mistake was made in the setup, maintenance or recovery of the system because it's different, it would be just as easy to say it was negligent to use it instead of something that was well understood by your team. Trade-offs like this are made all the time, to claim negligence is to ignore the complexities of the situation.

This. I'm more than willing to try different UNIXes, and I have. But when we're talking about running a business-critical database, it's a hard requirement that both myself and my teammates are able to maintain, keep patched, and generally competently administer the system. Trading an OS that my team has decades of combined experience running in production with for one where we collectively have zero production experience is a non-starter.

A good DBMS includes a bunch of integrity-preserving measures to deal with data corruption. No reason not to run your DBMS on ZFS as far as I'm aware (edit: at least if the workload does not trigger excessive fragmentation), but I'd reserve the word 'negligence' for, say, not using an appropriate backup solution.

Something funny about this: where are the OSS RDBMSs which do not rely on a general purpose filesystem? Because in the commercial RDBMS space that is a thing.

My impression, wrong or not, was always that those were features from when a good volume manager could not be counted on in the host system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com