How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database

Re:How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database by electroly on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @08:04PM (#31091057)

I'm curious how this works for on-prem. Our SQL Server cluster is on-prem; we can't just spin up another cluster. An important aspect of the SQL Server upgrade process is it doesn't require any extra nodes. What did people do for pgsql upgrades before everyone moved to the cloud?

Here's a nice thing about PostgreSQL over SQL Server to satiate the fans: SQL Server is absurdly expensive to run in the cloud. I can't believe anyone uses RDS for SQL Server. Even in EC2 it's horrifically expensive. That's the main reason we have an on-prem cluster.

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Re:How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database by Symbiote on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @02:32AM (#31093522)

I would use the existing nodes (just like the SQL Server upgrade, you have reduced redundancy during the upgrade).

Under 1 minute of downtime was acceptable for us, so:

  systemctl stop postgresql-11 && \
    pg_upgrade --link ... && \
    systemctl start postgresql-12

was more-or-less the process last time I did this. We have only 500GB of data, and I think pg_upgrade ran in 15 seconds or so.

If a minute of downtime isn't acceptable, then it presumably isn't acceptable in case of unexpected hardware failure either, and you'd be using one of the commercial multi-master extensions.

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