To upgrade or not to upgrade? That is the question.

On a fairly regular basis the Postgres community hear from users who are complaining of bugs in old versions of Postgres - they'll post a bug report or a request for help on one of the mailing lists saying something along the lines of having run into an issue with PostgreSQL 8.4.2 for example, and immediately be met with suggestions to upgrade to the latest version because there have been 37 bug fixes and 5 security issues resolved since 8.4.2 was released.

Generally this happens with one of two types of users. There are those that just don't bother to upgrade (who we can do little about), and those that don't upgrade because they are concerned that changes to PostgreSQL will break their application. This latter class of user is sometimes also restricted by what they can do by corporate policies in their workplace.

The Postgres developers are mindful of this issue and have practices in place to allow users to safely upgrade without significant risk of behavioural changes breaking their applications. The practice is really quite simple; minor upgrades of PostgreSQL never include new features.

What does this mean in practice? Well, PostgreSQL version numbers are in 3 parts, X.Y.Z (some packages such as the EnterpriseDB installers also add a build suffix):

X.Y: This is the major version number of the server, for example, 8.4, 9.0 or 9.1. New major versions may include new functionality, require upgrades to the database files on disk and generally require thorough testing of applications prior to deployment.

Z: This is the minor version number. This number is increased for bug fixes releases, also known as "point releases". These releases never include new features; only carefully applied bug fixes. Point releases are fully compatible with previous point releases of the same major version and should require minimal testing prior to deployment on existing installations.

Returning to our opening example, the user in this case is not being told to upgrade to 9.1.1 - the latest and greatest release at the time of writing, complete with a myriad of new features and changes from 8.4.2 - but to 8.4.9, the latest point release in the 8.4 series, which is functionally identical to 8.4.2. This numbering scheme and the processes behind it are specifically designed to allow users to safely and easily upgrade their database servers to minimise the number of known bugs in the software; in fact the PostgreSQL developers consider not upgrading to the latest point release to be riskier than upgrading.

So next time you're "certifying" your application with PostgreSQL, aim to certify it with a specific major version of the server, and avoid getting into a situation where you prevent yourself from updating to the latest point release as doing so can cause more problems than it can solve, and if you're a sysadmin or DBA rest assured that point releases won't introduce functionality changes and should be welcomed and installed as soon as possible!

StackBuilder Package Updates

If you've ever used one of the PostgreSQL installers for v8.2 or above, either the old Windows MSI installer or the newer "one click" installers that also support Linux and Mac, you'll probably have come across StackBuilder. For those that haven't or those that never found the time, StackBuilder was introduced with the PostgreSQL 8.2 installer to allow us to distribute different components of PostgreSQL independently of the server itself. Originally in 8.0/8.1, the installer included lots of additional products, such as the ODBC, JDBC, OLEDB and .NET drivers, Slony and PostGIS.  As you can imagine, this proved near impossible to maintain as we needed to try to coordinate the release of products from multiple independently run projects.

StackBuilder was the solution to this. The installers were cut down to essentially include just the PostgreSQL server, pgAdmin and StackBuilder, which allowed us to provide all the other components on independent release schedules. It also gave us a vehicle to encourage adoption of PostgreSQL by other Open Source projects, by including packages for them as well, so with a few mouse clicks a user could be up and running with a "stack" like Drupal, Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL on their OS of choice. We made a conscious decision to include software other than well known Open Source products in the StackBuilder catalog as well, with the aim of giving the user as much choice of product to use with PostgreSQL as possible - as a result we have products in the catalog from multiple vendors and projects, as well as the "PostgreSQL family" projects. If you're interested in having a PostgreSQL related product included in the catalog, please contact me to discuss how we can make that happen.

So, with the refresher course out of the way, todays blog post is prompted by the latest round of updates that I've been adding to the catalog - we've got 42 updates to the Open Source packages, as well as 18 new packages, including for the first time, pgBouncer, pgMemcache and Drupal 7.

Updates:

• Apache/PHP 2.2.20-5.3.8: Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32
• mediaWiki 1.17.0: Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32
• pgJDBC 9.0-801: Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32
• phpBB 9.0-801: Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32
• PostGIS 1.3.6 for PG 8.3: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• PostGIS 1.4.2 for PG 8.4: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• PostGIS 1.5.3 for PG 9.0: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• psqlODBC 09.00.0310: Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32
• Slony 1.2.22 for PG 8.3: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• Slony 2.0.7 for PG 8.4: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• Slony 2.0.7 for PG 9.0: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• Npgsql 2.0.11: Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32

New releases:

• Drupal 7:  Linux32, Linux64, Mac, Win32
• pgBouncer:  Linux32, Linux64
• pgMemcache 2.0.1 for PG 9.0: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• pgMemcache 2.0.1 for PG 9.1: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• PostGIS 1.5.3 for PG 9.1: Linux32, Linux64, Mac
• Slony 2.0.7 for PG 9.1: Linux32, Linux64, Mac

Note that the PostGIS community maintain the PostGIS installers for Windows which will be released as soon as they're available. Windows updates for Slony are still in development due to an issue found in QA. Mac and Windows builds of pgBouncer are on their way.

To download and install any of these packages, just run StackBuilder - if you don't have it already you can get it with the PostgreSQL Installers.

Enjoy :-)

PostgreSQL Conference Europe: Are you ready?

PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 starts 2 weeks from today in the beautiful city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. This is the fourth annual conference hosted by PostgreSQL Europe, following on from extremely successful events in Prato (Italy), Paris and Stuttgart, and is aimed at developers, DBAs, technologists and decision makers either using, or considering using the world's most advanced Open Source database.

This year we have four days on the schedule, with a kick-off day of training sessions hosted by respected PostgreSQL developers such as Greg Smith, Bruce Momjian, Magnus Hagander, Guillaume Lelarge and more. Topics will cover performance tuning, application development, database administration, replication & high availability and geospatial. The training sessions are available on their own, or as part of a regular conference attendance at additional - but very reasonable - cost.

We had a record number of talk proposals submitted this year but we've resisted the urge to host even more sessions in parallel - in fact we've reduced the number of parallel sessions to three as we all know how frustrating it can be when more than one that you want to see are at the same time. Instead we've extended the conference by a day to accomodate over 40 different sessions, which has the added bonus of allowing an additional night of social activities - always a great way to discuss the latest technologies, trends and ideas with other Postgres users over a beer or two.

We've got a great range of topics for this year, covering new features in PostgreSQL 9.1 and beyond, developing applications, running Postgres in the cloud, hacking PostgreSQL internals, tools and add-on products and managing large databases, presented by a wide cross-section of users and developers, including a number of this year's Google Summer of Code students who will talk about their work. You can view the complete schedule on the conference website.

Our opening keynote this year will be presented by Ram Mohan, EVP and CTO of Afilias who manage the .info, .org and .mobi top level domains using Postgres. Ram will be discussing the business decisions and strategy around their use of PostgreSQL. Our closing keynote will be presented by Ed Boyajian, President and CEO of EnterpriseDB who will discuss PostgreSQL's role in the post-Oracle era.

So, if you haven't done so already, head on over to the website to register as an attendee to avoid missing out on what promises to be an outstanding conference in an fantastic location. See you in Amsterdam!