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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

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Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#121

Post by elric »

xvinci wrote: post #115
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.

Sure. Defense in depth is important. But I hope that your application is only able to talk TCP/5432 to psql. No amount of psql upgrading will protect you against SQL injections in shitty application code.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#123

Post by atoav »

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…

Also:

5. If your IT department is spread thin already and that old version is running fine, the incentive to potentially create more work for yourself is not gigantic.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#124

Post by Scramblejams »

api wrote: post #9
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…

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.

> I've always wondered why Postgres is so insanely popular.

Just another anecdote: MySQL lost data for me (2004). I spent some time evaluating the projects and Postgres’ development process seemed much more mature — methodical, careful, and focused on correctness. Boring, which I loved.

I didn’t need whatever perf advantage MySQL had so I switched to Postgres and never looked back. And then the Oracle drama and Monty’s behavior around it — not saying he was wrong or right, but it was the opposite of boring — just reinforced my decision.

I like to play with new tech in various spots of the stack, but for filesystems and databases I go boring all the way.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#125

Post by Propelloni »

slotrans wrote: post #67
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…

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

It is hard to live down a reputation ;)

MySQL was immortalized as the database in every LAMP stack. And just like PHP it improved considerably since then.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#126

Post by yobert »

mnahkies wrote: post #98
yobert wrote: post #36

I have a large production deployment that is still on 9.6 because the software depends on table inheritance. (Oh man!)

Unless I'm mistaken table inheritance is still a thing in current PG versions, in terms of partitioning at least it's just less commonly used in favour of declarative partitioning since it's easier to manage. It's been a long time since I worked with v9.x in anger, so I could well be forgetting things though https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-partitioning.htm...

Our problem isn't the inheritance feature itself-- it's the removal of the config knob `sql_inheritance` which lets you change whether inherited tables are included in queries by default or not (behavior controlled manually by the * notation). It's a goofy behavior nobody liked, but we have a mountain of SQL that depends on that knob. It's fixable... Just a pain :)

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#127

Post by benoitg »

pritambarhate wrote: post #120
sgarland wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, the innodb_file_per_table variable has been set to 1 for a long time. Running OPTIMIZE TABLE frees up the disk space in this case.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#128

Post by Dalewyn »

atoav wrote: post #123
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…

Also: 5. If your IT department is spread thin already and that old version is running fine, the incentive to potentially create more work for yourself is not gigantic.

One of the first laws of the universe that a good engineer learns is: Do not fix what is not broken.

And no, being old is not broken.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#129

Post by jgb1984 »

I've used postgresql in most of my previous jobs, but using mariadb in my current one, and I must say it's a joy to administer.

The replication and high availability that mariadb offers is rock solid, and much more advanced than what postgresql has to offer. It works out of the box, no plugins or third party shenanigans needed, and there is "one obvious way" to do it. Not a dozen options like in the postgresql ecosystem, each with it's own quirks and drawbacks.

Also, upgrades are a dream. I did 4 major long term stable release upgrades so far and everything was fully automatic and smooth sailing all around.

All of that with about 10 seconds downtime only for each upgrade, despite being a chunky 6TB database, thanks to the user friendly replication process.

I respect postgresql a lot, but mariadb allows me to sleep much better at night thanks to replication, smooth upgrades and no VACUUM to worry about.

Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

#130

Post by newaccount74 »

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…

> 3. While upgrades aren't hard, they're not easy either

I guess it depends on scale? I was surprised how easy it was on Ubuntu. There was an automatic migration script, and it worked. Took less than 5 minutes to upgrade.

Sure, there was downtime, but I think most applications out there can live with scheduled downtime of a few minutes.

If you can't have downtime, then nothing is easy.

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