Thread: a simple-minded question about updating
I work with Postgres and wonder whether for my purposes there is a good-enough reason to update one of these days.
I’m an editor working with some 60,000 Early Modern texts, many of them in need of some editorial attention. The texts are XM encoded documents. Each word is wrapped in a <w> element with attributes for various linguistic metadata. Typically a type of error occurs several or many times, and at the margins they need individual attention. I use Python scripts to extract stuff from the main corpus—sometimes dozens, sometimes thousands or millions—turn them into keyword in contexts and import them into Postgres. I basically use Postgres as a giant spreadsheet. Its excellent string-handling routines make it relatively easy to to perform search and sort operations that identify tokens in need of correction. Once they corrections are made in Postgres—typically as batch updates-- I move them as a data frame into Python, and from Python I move them back into the texts.
I do this on a recent Mac with 64 GB of memory and a 6 cor i& processor. I use Data Studio as an editing interface.
Unless a more recent version of Postgress has additional string handling routines, or indexing routines that speed up working with tables with rows in the low millions, or other features that are likely to speed up operations, I don’t see any reasons to update.
I could imagine a table that has up to 40 million rows. That would be pretty sluggish on my current equipment, which handles up to 10 million rows quite comfortably.
A I right in thinking that given my tasks and equipment it would be a waste of time to update? Or is there something I’m missing?
Martin Mueller
Professor emeritus of English and Classiccs
Northwestern University
On 5/18/23 21:08, Martin Mueller wrote: > I work with Postgres and wonder whether for my purposes there is a > good-enough reason to update one of these days. Since you have not mentioned the Postgres version you are on now, there is really no definitive way to answer this. Though as a rule keeping up with minor updates to whatever major version you running is a good idea. Should be noted that at some point ~5 years from a version's initial release the minor updates will stop. That is when community support ends. Then the answer to any problem you have will start with; you should upgrade. > > Martin Mueller > > Professor emeritus of English and Classiccs > > Northwestern University > -- Adrian Klaver adrian.klaver@aklaver.com
I currently work with Postgres 13. I forgot to mention that. From which I gather that around version 18 it would be time to upgrade. But in the interim I’d be OK.
Right?
From: Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com>
Date: Thursday, May 18, 2023 at 11:21 PM
To: Martin Mueller <martinmueller@northwestern.edu>, pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org <pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: a simple-minded question about updating
On 5/18/23 21:08, Martin Mueller wrote:
> I work with Postgres and wonder whether for my purposes there is a
> good-enough reason to update one of these days.
Since you have not mentioned the Postgres version you are on now, there
is really no definitive way to answer this.
Though as a rule keeping up with minor updates to whatever major version
you running is a good idea. Should be noted that at some point ~5 years
from a version's initial release the minor updates will stop. That is
when community support ends. Then the answer to any problem you have
will start with; you should upgrade.
>
> Martin Mueller
>
> Professor emeritus of English and Classiccs
>
> Northwestern University
>
--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@aklaver.com
On 5/19/23 07:25, Martin Mueller wrote: > I currently work with Postgres 13. I forgot to mention that. From which > I gather that around version 18 it would be time to upgrade. But in the > interim I’d be OK. > > Right? Strictly speaking yes, though the longer you wait the greater the number of changes you will have to deal with. It is a good idea to read the Release Notes: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/release.html for each new release to see how far away the new code is getting from your existing version. Breaking changes are restricted(with some exceptions) to the X.0 release where X is new major version. So you can save some time by just looking at the notes for the .0 releases. > -- > Adrian Klaver > adrian.klaver@aklaver.com > -- Adrian Klaver adrian.klaver@aklaver.com