pg on Debian servers

Apologies for something which is distro related, but I was bitten by a
"silly mistake"- one of my own, I hasten to say- earlier.

Several legacy programs written in Delphi ground to a halt this morning,
which turned out to be because a Debian system had updated its copy of
PostgreSQL and restarted the server, which broke any live connections.

At least some versions of Delphi, not to mention other IDE/RAD tools
with database-aware components, don't automatically try to reestablish a
database session that's been interrupted. In any event, an unexpected
server restart (irrespective of all investment in UPSes etc.) has the
potential of playing havoc on a clustered system.

Is there any way that either the package maintainer or a site
administrator/programmer such as myself can mark the Postgres server
packages as "manual upgrade only" or similar? Or since I'm almost
certainly not the first person to be bitten by this, is there a
preferred hack in mitigation?

--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]