Major version upgrades

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
postgresql
Domain
databases

Research direction

Start with the PostgreSQL 13 upgrading documentation linked in the issue and review the proposed snapshot-restore sequence. The issue names no repository files or tests; define the orchestration scope and acceptance criteria for restoring a snapshot into a new app before implementation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Major upgrades

For major releases of PostgreSQL, the internal data storage format is subject to change, thus complicating upgrades. The traditional method for moving data to a new major version is to dump and reload the database, though this can be slow. A faster method is pg_upgrade.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to perform in-place upgrades across major versions. I think we should heavily consider allowing users to restore a snapshot into a new app. I think this is relatively common practice across vendors and would provide a safe passage for users to test the new version against their dataset, client, etc. before fully committing.

I think there are quite a few ways we could do this, but here's a rough example of what this process could look like:

  1. Provision a new app.
  2. Provision and attach a new volume that meets the size constraints specified by the target snapshot.
  3. Provision and attach a second "source" volume containing the restore data.
  4. Issue a pg_dump on the source volume and work to perform the upgrade process outlined here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/upgrading.html
  5. Detach the source volume

It certainly requires some orchestration, so not sure how feasible this process will be in the short-to-medium term.

Reference: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/upgrading.html

Dominant language
Go
Stars
332
Forks
123
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