Thread: How to Works with Centos
Hello,
The company I’m working for develops a product which uses Centos 6/7 (different versions of the product) and also uses Vertica and PostgreSQL.
During the course of the development of the latest version of our product, we ran into problems that lead us to contact Vertica’s R&D team, which in turn suggested we upgrade our database to the latest version as the current one is not supported.
When the product was first developed we used PostgreSQL 9.2, and after upgrading to Centos 7 we considered upgrading our PostgreSQL version as well.
Trying to learn from the aforementioned incident, we floated idea of upgrading our PostgreSQL version to the latest one in order to get the performance improvement, latest features, bug fixes and support.
Upon doing so, our DevOps team in response insisted (and still insists) that we keep using version 9.2 as it is part of the Centos 7 distribution, and they believe that version to be “best practice”, even though PostgreSQL 9.2 is no longer supported.
My question is:
Is working with the default distribution’s version (9.2) really the “best practice”, even though it is no longer supported?
I have looked for documentation regarding the matter but could not find any answers. I would greatly appreciate your assistance with the matter.
Thanks in advance,
Benjamin
On 25 December 2017 at 09:39, Benyamin Guedj <benyamin621@gmail.com> wrote: > > Upon doing so, our DevOps team in response insisted (and still insists) that > we keep using version 9.2 as it is part of the Centos 7 distribution, and > they believe that version to be “best practice”, even though PostgreSQL 9.2 > is no longer supported. > > My question is: > > Is working with the default distribution’s version (9.2) really the “best > practice”, even though it is no longer supported? > clearly no, our versioning page says (https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/): """ The PostgreSQL project aims to fully support a major release for five years. After its end-of-life (EOL) month ends, a major version receives one final minor release. After that final minor release, bug fixing ceases for that major version. """ so, if bug fixing ceases for a non-supported version it's clearly no "best practice" to continue using it. so you have two options: 1) use the packages from yum.postgresql.org for a supported version 2) get commercial support for your out-of-community-support verssion but even if you do 2, that would be a preparatory step looking forward to upgrade to a newer version -- Jaime Casanova www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
On Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 06:48:09PM -0500, Jaime Casanova wrote: > so you have two options: > > 1) use the packages from yum.postgresql.org for a supported version > 2) get commercial support for your out-of-community-support verssion > > but even if you do 2, that would be a preparatory step looking > forward to upgrade to a newer version You need to think long-term here. The product that you are developing and/or maintaining will need to stay around for a couple of years as well, those are years where you should keep up with the community support window of 5 years for a major version of PostgreSQL. That's what I do on the stuff I work with, and the outcome is much better at the end as there is no need to finish with a private fork of an out-of-support version, normally at least. -- Michael
Attachment
On Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 4:07 PM, Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 06:48:09PM -0500, Jaime Casanova wrote: >> so you have two options: >> >> 1) use the packages from yum.postgresql.org for a supported version >> 2) get commercial support for your out-of-community-support verssion >> >> but even if you do 2, that would be a preparatory step looking >> forward to upgrade to a newer version > > You need to think long-term here. The product that you are developing > and/or maintaining will need to stay around for a couple of years as > well, those are years where you should keep up with the community support > window of 5 years for a major version of PostgreSQL. That's what I do > on the stuff I work with, and the outcome is much better at the end > as there is no need to finish with a private fork of an out-of-support > version, normally at least. +1. Someone with whom I was speaking recently mentioned that they were upgrading from 9.2 to 9.6, and that sounds like a pretty good plan to me if you want to have a release that will be supported for a while but is thought to be stable now. We're still finding bugs in v10 at a slightly alarming rate, but that will, I hope, settle down over the next few months. Meanwhile, 9.6 has been out for a year and, as far as I've seen, all indications seem to be that it's a pretty solid release. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 4:48 AM, Jaime Casanova <jaime.casanova@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
On 25 December 2017 at 09:39, Benyamin Guedj <benyamin621@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Upon doing so, our DevOps team in response insisted (and still insists) that
> we keep using version 9.2 as it is part of the Centos 7 distribution, and
> they believe that version to be “best practice”, even though PostgreSQL 9.2
> is no longer supported.
>
> My question is:
>
> Is working with the default distribution’s version (9.2) really the “best
> practice”, even though it is no longer supported?
>
clearly no, our versioning page says
(https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/):
"""
The PostgreSQL project aims to fully support a major release for five
years. After its end-of-life (EOL) month ends, a major version
receives one final minor release. After that final minor release, bug
fixing ceases for that major version.
"""
so, if bug fixing ceases for a non-supported version it's clearly no
"best practice" to continue using it.
so you have two options:
1) use the packages from yum.postgresql.org for a supported version
2) get commercial support for your out-of-community-support verssion
I would like to add here, as your team seems more interested in packages available from CentOS, there is a third option also available that might interest you.
Along with PostgreSQL 9.2 package (default) CentOS 7 project also provide PostgreSQL 9.6 but via Software Collections (SCL) that target similar problem that you are facing i.e.
https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/sclo/x86_64/rh/rh-postgresql96/
I hope that will help. Thanks.
Regards,
Muhammad Asif Naeem
but even if you do 2, that would be a preparatory step looking
forward to upgrade to a newer version
--
Jaime Casanova www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
Hi, On Mon, 2017-12-25 at 16:39 +0200, Benyamin Guedj wrote: > Is working with the default distribution’s version (9.2) really the “best > practice”, even though it is no longer supported? Red Hat / CentOS also provides PostgreSQL 9.6 (and 9.5, IIRC), via SCL. I mean, those versions are also "supported" by them. As mentioned in this thread, the community RPMs are also a (better) option, because you can install multiple versions at the same time. Regards, -- Devrim Gündüz EnterpriseDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com PostgreSQL Consultant, Red Hat Certified Engineer Twitter: @DevrimGunduz , @DevrimGunduzTR