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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

(neon.tech)
264 points davidgomes | 3 comments | 17 Oct 24 21:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.446s | source
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paulryanrogers ◴[17 Oct 24 23:59 UTC] No.41875055[source]▶
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 downtime.

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slotrans ◴[18 Oct 24 04:00 UTC] No.41876232[source]▶
"Not as robust as MySQL"? Surely you're joking.
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sgarland ◴[18 Oct 24 04:20 UTC] No.41876309[source]▶
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, etc.

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wbl ◴[18 Oct 24 04:39 UTC] No.41876387[source]▶
Yeah but you don't need to worry about your data existing. MySQL has been known to silently fail the one job of a DB.
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1. maxk42 ◴[18 Oct 24 06:09 UTC] No.41876737[source]▶
Not in around 15 years. You're thinking of when MyISAM was the default storage engine for MySQL. It has been InnoDB for over a decade. InnoDB is very reliable - I've never had a single data loss incident in all that time, and I've managed some very large (PB-scale) and active databases.

Postgres is definitely more difficult to administer.

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2. Symbiote ◴[18 Oct 24 10:25 UTC] No.41877978[source]▶
People are criticising decade-old releases of PostgreSQL, so it seems fair to compare them to similarly aged MySQL releases.
3. yxhuvud ◴[18 Oct 24 10:38 UTC] No.41878085[source]▶
MySQL used to have horrible and very unsafe defaults for new installations that persisted well after the introduction of InnoDB. Those went unfixed for a very long time.