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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
131–140 of 452 posts
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#132Quick note that the article is talking about why folks are on versions of PG that are not ancient (14, 15).
right? we're on 13 and only now starting to consider upgrading to 16, and I don't think we're very abnormal and I don't consider 13 ancient. We have customers still using 9.3. (That last one does actually count as ancient.)
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#133Lots 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.
If the database server has significant "other apps", which it probably doesn't.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it was true in 2012, because sysadmins would be the ones trying to make it run reliably, including things like replication, upgrades, etc. Pretty sure that even in 2012 MySQL had very easy to use replication, which Postgres didn't have well into the late 2010s (does it today? It's been a while since I've ran any databases).
> I doubt it was true in 2012, because sysadmins would be the ones trying to make it run reliably, including things like replication, upgrades, etc. Possibly I got it wrong and switched around which was easier on the devs and which was easier on the sysads? In my defence, ISTR, when talking to sysads about MySQL vs PostgreSQL, they preferred the latter due to having less to worry about once deployed (MySQL would appa…
MyISAM in the olden days could/would magically lose data. InnoDB has been the de facto standard for a while and I haven't seen data loss attributed to it.
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#135Upgrades 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)
I think so. The PostgreSQL logo is an elephant, and the community calls him "Slonik", probably derived from the Russian word for elephant. There is also a node.js driver that is called "slonik"
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#136I'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 ecosys…
This is highly interesting to me because I was on the PostgreSQL bandwagon way before it was cool(mostly because I’m a BSD/MIT license fanatic).
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#137pg15 is not ancient at all and it has been a part of latest debian hence I don't see an issue. Same with python or any other dependency. You rarely need the newest shiny these days and being within the support window is fine
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Because it's not tainted and cursed by Oracle, like MySQL (and Oracle).
That's what MariaDB is for, right? I'm surprised to hear people recommend the Oracle fork of MySQL (still called MySQL because they own the trademark) rather than the original project (now called MariaDB)
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#139Upgrades 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…
MySQL vs. PostgreSQL - Jepsen Analyses
https://jepsen.io/analyses/mysql-8.0.34 ( MySQL 8.0.34 2023-12-19 )
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695750
"MySQL is a popular relational database. We revisit Kleppmann’s 2014 Hermitage and confirm that MySQL’s Repeatable Read still allows G2-item, G-single, and lost update. Using our transaction consistency checker Elle, we show that MySQL Repeatable Read also violates internal consistency. Furthermore, it violates Monotonic Atomic View: transactions can observe some of another transaction’s effects, then later fail to observe other effects of that same transaction. We demonstrate violations of ANSI SQL’s requirements for Repeatable Read. We believe MySQL Repeatable Read is somewhat stronger than Read Committed. As a lagniappe, we show that AWS RDS MySQL clusters routinely violate Serializability."
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https://jepsen.io/analyses/postgresql-12.3 ( PostgreSQL 12.3 2020-06-12 )
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23498781
"PostgreSQL is a widely-known relational database system. We evaluated PostgreSQL using Jepsen’s new transactional isolation checker Elle, and found that transactions executed with serializable isolation on a single PostgreSQL instance were not, in fact, serializable. Under normal operation, transactions could occasionally exhibit G2-item: an anomaly involving a set of transactions which (roughly speaking) mutually fail to observe each other’s writes. In addition, we found frequent instances of G2-item under PostgreSQL “repeatable read”, which is explicitly proscribed by commonly-cited formalizations of repeatable read. As previously reported by Martin Kleppmann, this is due to the fact that PostgreSQL “repeatable read” is actually snapshot isolation. This behavior is allowable due to long-discussed ambiguities in the ANSI SQL standard, but could be surprising for users familiar with the literature. A patch for the bug we found in serializability is scheduled for the next minor release, on August 13th, and the presence of G2-item under repeatable read could be readily addressed through documentation."
Re: Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
#140Earlier 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 of both is that MySQL is easier for developers, PostgreSQL is easier for sysads. That was true in 2012; dunno if it still applies though.
>MySQL is easier for developers
Except that search doesn't work, because all text is in latin1 encoding.