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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

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Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#111

Post by The_Colonel »

bastawhiz wrote: post #70
evanelias wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you need to index fairly long strings in their entirety in a way that preserves collation behaviors? And why is a 768 character limit woefully bad, but a 2704 character limit is totally fine?

A URL, for instance, can't be safely stored in 768 characters, but it can be stored safely in 2704. If you then wanted to sort those URLs so that all URLs for each domain and path within that domain are adjacent, you need an index. Especially if you want to paginate over them with a cursor. Doing that without an index on the raw value is a royal pain in the ass. Hell, even just being able to sort user-submitted strin…

> it can be stored safely in 2704

No, it can't. URL doesn't have any length limit, regardless of the fact that different software will impose different limits.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#112

Post by sofixa »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #106
vivzkestrel wrote: post #102

i ll tell you why from my end. I installed Postgres14 via homebrew many years ago on my Apple M1 mac mini. I searched a lot on how to "upgrade" this installation but found nothing. I have a few databases running with data on it which I can't afford to lose if something goes down for more than 1 hour. I wish someone would guide me on how to actually install a newer postgres such as v17 without breaking an existing v14…

Forget about something as major as Postgres, I have trouble updating packages (that aren't install via pip/npm/cargo) on Linux all the time as a newbie. The experience is worse than Windows for some reason. Hell, I have a hard time to tell the version of some system build-in binaries. A few months ago, I have trouble to unzip a file which turns out ot be AES-encrypted. Some answers on SO [1] saying I should update my…

> I have trouble updating packages (that aren't install via pip/npm/cargo) on Linux all the time as a newbie. The experience is worse than Windows for some reason

If you haven't installed them via your programming language's package manager, you either installed them manually or via the OS package manager. The first one you'd know how to upgrade, and for the second you can ask it what version it is and what version is available to upgrade to (for compatibility reasons it might not be the latest, or latest major, unless you use the software vendor's own package manager repositories).

It's actually much easier than in Windows, because you have a piece of software (package manager) that is your one stop shop to knowing what is installed, update it, check versions available, etc. unless you've manually installed stuff.

In Windows you... google and download random .exes? Cool. As good as the worst possible option on Linux.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#114

Post by mkesper »

throwaway918299 wrote: post #35
justin_oaks wrote: post #19

My upgrade policy for everything: Significant security vulnerability? Upgrade Feature you need? Upgrade All other reasons: Don't upgrade. Upgrading takes effort and it is risky. The benefits must be worth the risks.

Here’s another reason to upgrade: your version is end of life and your cloud provider forced it. Thank you Amazon!

Yes, this is actually a good thing and comes with warnings beforehand.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#115

Post by xvinci »

elric wrote: post #110

Lots of dogmatism in this discussion, it seems. A couple of things: 1. Most psql deployments are not exposed to the interwebz, they are typically only accessible to the applications that need them by virtue of network setup (firewalls etc). This limits the attack vector to whatever the application does. Good. 2. Distro vendors (RHEL et al) often stick to major psql release for the lifecycle of the OS version. If the…

"What the application does" may not be what you think of, as it is dependent on how secure the application or the layers beneath it are. This is how people get everything pwned step by step. The database server may then reveal credentials to other apps etc.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#116

Post by thrdbndndn »

sofixa wrote: post #112
thrdbndndn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about something as major as Postgres, I have trouble updating packages (that aren't install via pip/npm/cargo) on Linux all the time as a newbie. The experience is worse than Windows for some reason. Hell, I have a hard time to tell the version of some system build-in binaries. A few months ago, I have trouble to unzip a file which turns out ot be AES-encrypted. Some answers on SO [1] saying I should update my…

> I have trouble updating packages (that aren't install via pip/npm/cargo) on Linux all the time as a newbie. The experience is worse than Windows for some reason If you haven't installed them via your programming language's package manager, you either installed them manually or via the OS package manager. The first one you'd know how to upgrade, and for the second you can ask it what version it is and what version i…

Not exactly random. It's not hard to tell which website is official 7-zip website. Also choco and scoop exist on Windows.

> As good as the worst possible option on Linux.

I understand this is not a fair comparison, but in practice, they're not as easy. When using Windows, I usually use it with a proper GUI interface, so popping up a browser and download the newest installer for a software from their official website would take me less than 1 min.

Doing similar for my Linux VPS with only a terminal is much more complicated.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#117

Post by linuxandrew »

sublinear wrote: post #48

corporate friction

Exactly this. At my old employer we (the sysadmins/operational DBAs) were pushing for newer, supported versions of Postgres. The push back was always the regression testing cycle, amount of desired change and willingness of the product owner to even engage. The testing cycle was so long that I tried to convince them to test on Postgres beta, because it would well and truly be prod with a few bugfix releases by the time testing was completed (alas, they went with n-1 release of Postgres instead).

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#118

Post by cenamus »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #2

Upgrades 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…

Is slony some sort of language joke? Slon is czech (probably slavic in general) for elephant.

(which may be actually derived from the turkish aslan, for lion, but somehow the animal got mixed up)

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#120

Post by pritambarhate »

sgarland wrote: post #74
slotrans wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not as robust as MySQL"? Surely you're joking.

They’re not wrong. If you’ve ever spent meaningful time administering both, you’ll know that Postgres takes far more hands-on work to keep it going. To be clear, I like both. Postgres has a lot more features, and is far more extensible. But there’s no getting around the fact that its MVCC implementation means that at scale, you have to worry about things that simply do not exist for MySQL: vacuuming, txid wraparound,…

My experience has been exactly opposite. Ability to do Vacuums is good. MySQL doesn’t free up space taken by deleted rows. The only option to free up the space is to mysqldump the db and load it again. Not practical in most of the situations.
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