Ignoring the obvious that not everybody gets to choose the operating system their enterprise uses, there's real reasons to use Windows for performance.
For one, SQL Server spanks most other databases for complex ad-hoc queries.
Don't get me wrong, PostgreSQL is getting a lot better these days, and I'm sure that for a lot of basic workloads its very competitive, but the query planner in SQL Server is basically black magic.
There are very few (any?) database engines out there that can, in a single query, combine in-memory tables, remote tables, functions, materalised views, columnar data, and recursive joins then run that query in parallel and efficiently.
I think Oracle has most of those checkbox features, and perhaps a couple of others do too (DB2 perhaps?), but as far as I know MS SQL Server still outperforms them for this type of thing.
Mind you, Oracle scales to bigger clusters, and DB2 runs on bigger iron, but that's not my use-case. I have one Intel box.
> Ignoring the obvious that not everybody gets to choose the operating system their enterprise uses
For sure. If you can't choose, then I don't blame you.
> there's real reasons to use Windows for performance
I can't really think of any reason though. You gave the example of SQLServer, but that also runs on Linux. Does SQL Server perform better on Windows than Linux?
