Re: New to postgres

On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 07:14:13PM +0000, Carrillo, Juan R wrote:
> Good afternoon
>
> I am New to postgres Database. I have been tasked by my current
> management to upgrade our current postgres DB version 9.6.15 to
> a supported version of postgres. I am not sure if we should upgrade
> to 10, 11, 12 or 13. We are currently running postgres 9.6.15 on Red
> Hat Enterprise Linux Work Stations - Linux Version 7. I believe we
> should be running Linux 8 on RHEL. I was wondering if Dell Serers
> would support an upgrade of postgres 10 to Linux 8. Again I am New to
> postgres DB and any assistance is appreciated.

Hi.
This is somewhat complicated.

First of all - you should try to upgrade to newest - 13.3.
Second - for RedHat-ish distributions there is
https://yum.postgresql.org/, and it seems that there is pg 13 for RH7
(https://yum.postgresql.org/packages/#pg13)

Now, about how to do the upgrade - there are many paths, some are
simple, some are more complicated, some require more downtime, some
less.

Which path you will chose depends on your data size, downtime
requirements, and expertise level.

Unfortunately I can't provide much more information about redhat, as
I simply don't know it, and am not sure what tools, especially for
upgrading, they provide.

Generally, I would suggest that you made a copy of your production
database on some side system (even your laptop/workstation), and try
various approaches.

Couple of tools, in order of easy to hard to learn from scratch:
1. pg_dump and pg_restore
2. pg_upgrade
3. pglogical replication

Best regards,

depesz