Re: Some thoughts on NFS

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 10:59 AM Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> The only case I've run into people wanting to use postgres on NFS, the NFS server is a big filer from netapp or hitachi or whomever. And you're not going to be able to run something like that on top of it.

Yeah. :-(

It seems, however, we have no way of knowing to what extent that big
filer actually implements the latest NFS specs and does so correctly.
And if it doesn't, and data goes down the tubes, people are going to
blame PostgreSQL, not the big filer, either because they really
believe we ought to be able to handle it, or because they know that
filing a trouble ticket with NetApp isn't likely to provoke any sort
of swift response. If PostgreSQL itself is speaking NFS, we might at
least have a little more information about what behavior the filer
claims to implement, but even then it could easily be "lying." And if
we're just seeing it as a filesystem mount, then we're just ... flying
blind.

> There might be a use-case for the split that you mention, absolutely, but it's not going to solve the people-who-want-NFS situation. You'd solve more of that by having the middle layer speak "raw device" underneath and be able to sit on top of things like iSCSI (yes, really).

Not sure I follow this part.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company