Those enterprises that I mentioned often not only maintain their current workloads on AIX but even add new environments to it. An example: an internal strategy defines that every mission critical application needs to use Oracle or Db2 as its' data store and another strategy says that all Oracle/Db2 workloads need to run on AIX. In companies with such a setup even today new applications are deployed on AIX. Well, the databases for those applications at least ;) New applications indeed only very rarely land there as they usually are hosted on Linux in some VMware environment.
AIX is still the go-to platform for a bunch of financial institutations (banks and insurance companies). Although there are a lot of companies within that sector that slowly move to Linux on x86 I know from first hand experience that there are also still a lot of enterprises that swear by running their Oracle/Db2/SAP workloads on AIX on Power.
Exactly.
db2set DB2_COMPATIBILITY_VECTOR=ORA
gives you Oracle compatibility. You can even get MySQL compatibility and I have actually used that once in the past.
As always: it depends. For some workloads something like Citus [1] might allow you stay within the PostgreSQL ecosystem even when you are trying to do OLAP.
That's fascinating. I did basically the exact same thing after joining Mastodon a couple of weeks ago and used an identical tech stack (Python Lambda as well as DynamoDB on AWS).
But instead of Ars Technica I created a bot for Planet PostgreSQL [1]: https://botsin.space/@planetpostgresql. In case anyone wants to do something similar but does not run an own instance - botsin.space is a dedicated place for bots [2].