Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
1–10 of 452 posts
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#2Upgrades are hard. There was no replication in the before times. The original block-level replication didn't work among different major versions. Slony was a painful workaround based on triggers that amplified writes.
Newer PostgreSQL versions are better. Yet still not quite as robust or easy as MySQL.
At a certain scale even MySQL upgrades can be painful. At least when you cannot spare more than a few minutes of downtime.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#3I've always found it fascinating that there is a vocal contingent at HN that seems to legitimately hate advertising. But then an article like this turns up that is obvious advertising and is also a good article - we get a nice summary of what the major performance features over different postgres versions are, and some interesting case studies (I'd never even heard of the NOT VALID option although apparently it is nothing new).
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#4The risk/reward ratio of fucking with something that works perfectly fine as is is not great.
So for fresh installs yes but existing ones not so much
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#5Related...
postgres 1958 0.0 0.0 247616 26040 ? S Jul21 3:03 /usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/postgres
postgres 1085195 0.0 0.0 249804 24740 ? Ss Aug19 2:01 /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/postgres
postgres 1085196 0.0 0.0 223240 27900 ? Ss Aug19 1:59 /usr/lib/postgresql/15/bin/postgres
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#6Related... postgres 1958 0.0 0.0 247616 26040 ? S Jul21 3:03 /usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/postgres postgres 1085195 0.0 0.0 249804 24740 ? Ss Aug19 2:01 /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/postgres postgres 1085196 0.0 0.0 223240 27900 ? Ss Aug19 1:59 /usr/lib/postgresql/15/bin/postgres Postgres is the only thing on my Debian that doesn't seamlessly automatically upgrade across dist-upgrades, but instead leaves old versions aro…
That's because you install versioned packages like postgresql-15: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/postgresql-15
That way you can have multiple versions of the same package.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#7Weird that the maybe-AI-generated image of a column says "Postgres 13" on it when the article talks about Postgres 17.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#8Because upgrading is a lot of work, and is higher risk than upgrading other software.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#9Upgrades are hard. There was no replication in the before times. The original block-level replication didn't work among different major versions. Slony was a painful workaround based on triggers that amplified writes. Newer PostgreSQL versions are better. Yet still not quite as robust or easy as MySQL. At a certain scale even MySQL upgrades can be painful. At least when you cannot spare more than a few minutes of dow…
I've always wondered why Postgres is so insanely popular. I mean it has some nice things like very powerful support for a very comprehensive subset of SQL functionality, but most apps don't need all that.
It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#10Upgrades are hard. There was no replication in the before times. The original block-level replication didn't work among different major versions. Slony was a painful workaround based on triggers that amplified writes. Newer PostgreSQL versions are better. Yet still not quite as robust or easy as MySQL. At a certain scale even MySQL upgrades can be painful. At least when you cannot spare more than a few minutes of dow…
I've always wondered why Postgres is so insanely popular. I mean it has some nice things like very powerful support for a very comprehensive subset of SQL functionality, but most apps don't need all that. It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.
What's the alternative? MySQL? No transactional DDL, immediate fail.