RE: Remove AIX Support (was: Re: Relation bulk write facility)

Hi,
Historically many public hospitals I work for had IBM Power hardware.
The SMT8 (8 threads/cores) capabilities of Power CPU are useful to lower Oracle licence & support cost. We migrate to PostgreSQL and it runs very well on Power, especially since the (relatively) recent parallel executions features of the RDBMS match very well the CPU capabilities.
We chose to run PostgreSQL on Debian/Power (Little Endian) since ppc64le is an official Debian port. No AIX then. Only problem is that we still need to access Oracle databases and it can be useful to read directly with oracle_fdw but this tool needs an instant client and it's not open source of course. Oracle provides a binary but they don't provide patches for Debian/Power Little Endian (strange situation...) Just to say that of course we chose Linux for PostgreSQL but sometimes things are not so easy... We could have chosen AIX and we still have a ???? about interoperability.
Best regards,
Phil
________________________________
De : Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>
Envoyé : jeudi 29 février 2024 10:35
À : Michael Banck <mbanck(at)gmx(dot)net>
Cc : Noah Misch <noah(at)leadboat(dot)com>; Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com>; Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>; Peter Smith <smithpb2250(at)gmail(dot)com>; Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>; vignesh C <vignesh21(at)gmail(dot)com>; pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>; Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman(at)gmail(dot)com>
Objet : Re: Remove AIX Support (was: Re: Relation bulk write facility)

Hi,

On 2024-02-29 10:24:24 +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 12:57:31AM -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
> > On 2024-02-29 09:13:04 +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > > The commit message says there is not a lot of user demand and that might
> > > be right, but contrary to other fringe OSes that got removed like HPPA
> > > or Irix, I believe Postgres on AIX is still used in production and if
> > > so, probably in a mission-critical manner at some old-school
> > > institutions (in fact, one of our customers does just that) and not as a
> > > thought-experiment. It is probably well-known among Postgres hackers
> > > that AIX support is problematic/a burden, but the current users might
> > > not be aware of this.
> >
> > Then these users should have paid somebody to actually do maintenance work on
> > the AIX support,o it doesn't regularly stand in the way of implementing
> > various things.
>
> Right, absolutely.
>
> But: did we ever tell them to do that? I don't think it's reasonable for
> them to expect to follow -hackers and jump in when somebody grumbles
> about AIX being a burden somewhere deep down a thread...

Well, the thing is that it's commonly going to be deep down some threads that
portability problems cause pain. This is far from the only time. Just a few
threads:

https://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoauCAv+p4Z57PqgVgNxsApxKs3Yh9mDLdUDB8fep-s=1w@mail.gmail.com
https://postgr.es/m/CA+hUKGK=DOC+hE-62FKfZy=Ybt5uLkrg3zCZD-jFykM-iPn8yw@mail.gmail.com
https://postgr.es/m/20230124165814.2njc7gnvubn2amh6@awork3.anarazel.de
https://postgr.es/m/2385119.1696354473@sss.pgh.pa.us
https://postgr.es/m/20221005200710.luvw5evhwf6clig6@awork3.anarazel.de
https://postgr.es/m/20220820204401.vrf5kejih6jofvqb%40awork3.anarazel.de
https://postgr.es/m/E1oWpzF-002EG4-AG%40gemulon.postgresql.org

This is far from all.

The only platform rivalling AIX on the pain-caused metric is windows. And at
least that can be tested via CI (or locally). We've been relying on the gcc
buildfarm to be able to maintain AIX at all, and that's not a resource that
scales to many users.

Greetings,

Andres Freund