Re: Get PG primary version without substring manipulation?

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 8:52 AM Ron Johnson <ronljohnsonjr(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> cut, awk, head, bash, etc are easy enough, but am I overlooking some
> intrinsic method of getting just PG's primary version number (9.6 or 14, in
> my case) without doing substring manipulation?
>
> $ ssh foo.example.com pg_config --version
> PostgreSQL 9.6.24
> $ ssh foo.example.com psql --version
> psql (PostgreSQL) 9.6.24
> $ psql -h foo.example.com -Xtc "SELECT version();"
> PostgreSQL 9.6.24 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 4.8.5
> 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-44), 64-bit
>
> $ ssh bar.example.com pg_config --version
> PostgreSQL 14.12
> $ ssh bar.example.com psql --version
> psql (PostgreSQL) 14.12
> $ psql -h bar.example.com -Xtc "SELECT version();"
> PostgreSQL 14.12 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 8.5.0
> 20210514 (Red Hat 8.5.0-20), 64-bit
>
>

If you're logging into the database, I prefer getting the number value like
this when using it for comparisons. Still need to do some manipulation if
you just want the major version, but it's a lot easier to work with than
the strings you were getting with other methods.

keith=# select current_setting('server_version_num')::int;
current_setting
-----------------
160002

--
Keith Fiske
Senior Database Engineer
Crunchy Data - http://crunchydata.com