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Showing posts from January, 2017

PostgreSQL upgrades - Methodology

 Yesterday, i came across a conversation in postgres slack channel, someone was interested in upgrading his database and i realised that there is a pattern i see all the time. Those who are interested in upgrading major postgres versions, only ask questions about pg_upgrade. Don't get me wrong, pg_upgrade is awesome its well documented , and it explains things much better than i can.  During my time in OmniTI we've done many... MANY upgrades some of them pretty challenging, so i have come to realise that the upgrade tool is not as important as the plan and the methodology, especially during an upgrade or a migration. For this reason this post won't be about how to use pg_upgrade, instead it will be all about methodology, minimising downtime and reducing risk to almost zero. For this post i will be showing the steps i would follow in order to upgrade an 8.4.22 to 9.6.1. I will be using docker containers using a dockerfile that i wrote for lab use (more info about this d