> It couldn't be easier

If you have a trivial database, yes.

If you have a large, complicated database that takes hours/days to restore and has an HA SLA, very hell no.

That's not going to be easy with any database.

With mongodb in a HA setup you can perform a staggered upgrade of individual nodes in the cluster with no downtime. Very smooth in my experience.

Yeah, but what is your dataset is partitioned horizontally? It’s very smooth until it’s not. For example, if you are using the postGIS extensions and something changes with the new version that could be a showstopper

MySQL, for all its faults, actually handles this quite well. Generally speaking, assuming there aren't any major backwards-incompatibilities (which there haven't often been in my experience), you can start up the old server in place of the new server and you're good to go. Some table-rebuilding can be done in-place if you need to do things like recreate indices, but _generally_ you're good to go from there.

For more complex deployments, cases of backwards-incompatibilities in the data structure, or where I had reason to rebuild many large tables, you set up a replication secondary, do pre-upgrade migrations (e.g. in the case of deprecated functionality), upgrade the secondary, do post-upgrade migrations (e.g. in the case of new functionality), and wait for replication to catch up 100%. Then, after sending traffic to it for a bit to ensure it works correctly, you swap the primary and secondary and do it again.

We have customers with not quite TB levels, but at least several hundreds GB databases.

Upgrading the database server is as simple as shutting down the service, installing new executables and restarting the service. Downtime is measured in minutes.

When upgrading major versions, one might not get full functionality of the new features unless one upgrades the on-disk format (unload-reload), but you can run the new server version with older on-disk format just fine.

I worked at a place that was running a 8 year old install of Oracle 8i because upgrading was just too painful. Oracle 10g was out by that point. It's been over 15 years since... I wonder if they ever upgraded?