How to Works with Centos

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

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

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