[film42]

Corruption of database storage is the biggest fear so most upgrades are done cautiously. Historically postgres versions were released much much slower so the upgrade cadence was slower too. That said, we've been upgrading more frequently, especially since a lot of performance features are being released. So far our upgrades have been executed flawlessly for our cluster of postgres servers (~30 postgres chains each made up of 4x large dedicated servers).

[jeff-davis]

Postgres has released a new major version each year for a long time.

The only change is that versions used to be X.Y.Z, and now it just used X.Y. Now, X gets incremented for every major version, so it seems like it's moving faster.

[jsmith99]

The difference is that in place upgrades aren't possible for major versions.

[jeff-davis]

pg_upgrade is the way to do in-place upgrade between major versions:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgupgrade.html

[jeltz]

Jeff is right, PostgreSQL has released a new major yearly the last almost 25 years.

[tinus_hn]

That would only be possible if they started with version -10!

[alvherre]

Before version 10, the versioning scheme was different, and the first number was increased about once every five years: for example, 9.6 and 9.5 were consecutive yearly major releases. Version 7.0 was released around year 2000.