[ComputerGuru]

One thing is that Postgres doesn’t let you just upgrade to a new major version, as it doesn’t update the format of the on-disk binary database files; you must replicate from an existing node or dump/restore. MySQL upgrades the previous version when a new version is installed (which can cause problems, but is certainly “easier”).

[andruby]

Pg_upgrade [0] is an official part of postgres and does the binary inplace upgrade for you. You should obviously test before running in production, but it has worked perfectly for us when upgrading a 10+TB cluster from pg11 to pg13

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgupgrade.html

[conradfr]

Not totally ideal if you're using containers as it requires the binaries of the old and new version, unless I'm missing something.

[pgaddict]

That's hardly a PostgreSQL issue. If your container tech does not allow installing both old and new version of the binaries, it's a silly container tech.

[conradfr]

Well I use the official Postgresql docker image ;)

Also it looks like this is not new https://github.com/docker-library/postgres/issues/37

[Apaec]

Note that the "official" PostgreSQL docker image is maintained by Docker Inc - not by PostgreSQL contributors/members.

[salmo]

Containerized DBs are great for dev work, toy projects, etc.

Notsomuch for production. I know... folks do it. But I wouldn't run anything on it that I wouldn't do w/ sqlite.

[golergka]

Why not? Having the whole application in one Kubernetes setup, with all databases and other services is very convenient. Are you talking about performance overhead, or are there other drawbacks to this approach?

[ComputerGuru]

It does not make sense to run a rdbms in a container in prod; the entire OS is your container.

[conradfr]

It makes sense for me using CapRover for my side projects (with multiple envs) all in one cheap server.

[megous]

All distros I've ever used (debian, arch) provide previous and current version of postgresql for the purpose of easy pg_upgrade.

Debian even has special custom helper scripts for doing it. So just build your container with both postgres versions?

[ASalazarMX]

I think this is very convenient; you don't want to automatically upgrade a big database because you probably want to choose the downtime window. This is obviously by design, but I'd also like being able to automate the pg_upgradecluster pg_dropcluster process, specially for install-and-forget little databases.

IMO, the biggest shock from the MSSQL/MYSQL to PostgreSQL migration was not having 1 or 2 specific files per database, specially if you used to backup the files instead of doing a formal database backup.