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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

(neon.tech)
264 points davidgomes | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 21:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.311s | 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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SavageBeast ◴[18 Oct 24 05:28 UTC] No.41876576[source]▶
I recall this being the case A LOOOONG time ago but I haven't heard of, read about, been warned to look out for or personally seen such a thing in forever. Have you?

* I'm running a lot of MySQL stuff and such a topic might be of interest to me

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1. elisbce ◴[18 Oct 24 06:14 UTC] No.41876762[source]▶
Yes, it is messy when you want your MySQL databases to be mission critical in production, e.g. handling a large amount of customer data. Historically MySQL's High Availability architecture has a lot of design and implementation issues because it was an afterthought. Dealing with large amount of critical data means you need it to be performant, reliable and available at the same time, which is hard and requires you to deal with caching, sharding, replication, network issues, zone/resource planning, failovers, leader elections and semi-sync bugs, corrupted logs, manually fixing bad queries that killed the database, data migration, version upgrades, etc. There is a reason why big corps like Google/Meta has dedicated teams of experts (like people who actually wrote the HA features) to maintain their mission critical MySQL deployments.