Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

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.

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

Early MySQL versions made egregious design choices like quietly ignoring missing foreign keys and enum typos, truncating long strings, and randomly choosing rows from groups.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230922210124/https://grimoire....

Yeah, it was bad. What kills me is SQLite has its own absurd set of gotchas [0] yet is seen as amazing and wonderful by devs. PKs can have NULLs? Sure! Strings can have \0 in the middle of them? Why not? FKs aren’t enforced by default? Yeah, who needs referential integrity, anyway?

My only conclusion is that the majority of devs don’t actually read documentation, and rely purely on the last blog post they read to influence their infrastructure decisions.

[0]: https://www.sqlite.org/quirks.html