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Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

(neon.tech)
264 points davidgomes | 5 comments | 17 Oct 24 21:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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1. Propelloni ◴[18 Oct 24 07:36 UTC] No.41877139[source]▶
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.

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2. p_l ◴[18 Oct 24 08:06 UTC] No.41877303[source]▶
Also for licensing reasons for a long time there was surviving contingent of MySQL 3.23 in LAMP hosting.
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3. johannes1234321 ◴[18 Oct 24 12:43 UTC] No.41878895[source]▶
While that change from LGPL to GPL affected only the client library (server always was GPL(+commercial)) and the MySQL company relatively quickly reacted with a FOSS exception to the GPL and by providing a reimplementation of the client library under PHP license (mysqlnd) to serve that market.

(I joined MySQL shortly after that mess, before the Sun acquisition)

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4. p_l ◴[18 Oct 24 15:57 UTC] No.41880610{3}[source]▶
Random hosting providers that were major place for having your baby steps on LAMP stack didn't necessarily grok licensing much
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5. johannes1234321 ◴[18 Oct 24 23:04 UTC] No.41884281{4}[source]▶
They also didn't like updating software - to likely that update to PHP or MySQL or something broke some bad script by a customer, who'd complain to the host.