Re: Advice on binary installation

Hi Markus,

On 13. Apr, 2021, at 14:43, Zwettler Markus (OIZ) <Markus(dot)Zwettler(at)zuerich(dot)ch> wrote:
> We assume to get more than 100 Postgres clusters in the future.
>
> We will get a very heterogeneous binary installation basis if we install needed extensions (e.g. ip4r) or software (e.g. patroni) on a per project basis.
>
> There could be even more incompatibility problems otherwise if we install all global needed extensions or software with every project to get a homogenous binary installation.
>
> Software installation is done with yum using PGDG downstream channels.
>
> Any recommendations?

I don't know how you plan to do it, but I can only say how we do it:

- Compile from source including all extensions needed (make install-world).
Create a binary only directory this way, i.e. compile source to
/data/postgres/xx.x
- Create a tar file of said directory.
- Distribute that via Ansible untaring it on the destination servers.
- Have a standard postgresql.conf ready which includes a
shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements'
(or whatever you need) for use with initdb.

This way, we make sure that all servers get the same new software directory as needed in a separate directory including all necessary extensions, which means we can then delete the old directory if it is not longer needed (i.e. after all databases have been upgraded). Also, this makes sure, everything is loaded properly.

With individual and only some few cases, we then use "create extension", but only extensions which we deliver with the tar via Ansible. If there is doing to be a new extension (which we avaoid if we can), then we put it into the tar Archive and nowhere else. So it's on all servers, but only a few databases use it then.

Hope this helps.

Paul