Also:
5. If your IT department is spread thin already and that old version is running fine, the incentive to potentially create more work for yourself is not gigantic.
5. If your IT department is spread thin already and that old version is running fine, the incentive to potentially create more work for yourself is not gigantic.
And no, being old is not broken.
Amongst other reasons:
- Performing regular upgrades is an easy and cheap way to maintain a healthy knowledge base about the system. It's always easier to fix a system that is well understood than a black box which nobody has touched in 20 years. Upgrading regularly also leads to people being more comfortable with the upgrade process and it is likely to become a "regular thing" with checklists and other process improvements that make maintenance safer and more reliable.
- Doing preemptive maintenance means YOU get to choose when the system is unavailable and then you can plan accordingly, perhaps by planning it during a period with low usage or even arranging for a redundant system to take up the load. The alternative is leaving it up to chance when a system will fail, and that's frequently at high-load moments when you can least afford it.
- As a corollary to the previous point: a team which is in control of its systems can have more predictable output of feature work, since there will be fewer "unexpected" events.
Not maintaining your systems is only cheaper in the long run if you don't count the engineering time required to fix things when they break or need to be replaced. Ounce of prevention vs pound of cure and all that.
and
> Not maintaining your systems is only cheaper in the long run if you don't count the engineering time required to fix things when they break or need to be replaced. Ounce of prevention vs pound of cure and all that.
Those are pithy assertions, but I don't think they're universally factually correct. This applies at some scales, but not at others. One size does not fit all, nor does one maintenance strategy fit all. I do believe I specifically called out the dogmatism in this discussion, and yet here we go piling on more of the same. I don't think that's terribly helpful. I assume that everyone is well aware of all the points you raised, as I suspect that most people running PostgreSQL are not in fact incompetent.
Not everyone has a team which "is in control of its systems", nor can everyone afford such a team. It may well be cheaper for some people to run something old until it burns only to have The Database Consultant come in one day to raise it from the dead.
I mean I think it's because maintenance is so unglamorous. So when it happens and everything doesn't collapse, nobody remembers and starts asking why we even do it (and then sysadmins and middle management suddenly aren't a thing, and companies and IT become exactly as fragile as anyone with _actual_ understanding of management would expect).
Meanwhile when regular maintenance fails in progress, it often ends up in the news with a body count attached.
One of my favourite podcasts has a running joke that you should never do maintenance (because so many industrial disasters happen during it). Of course the bias is the point of the joke - and usually the reason things went bad is because either the maintenance was neglected until that point, or the engineering picked Postgresql, I mean, didn't consider the necessity of maintenance.
- If you're scared to perform upgrades, this is a good indicator that you lack confidence in your backup/recovery/reversion policies and procedures, probably for good reason, so maybe fix that.
That doesn't mean "upgrade recklessly," but it does mean you should know _why_ you're either upgrading or _NOT_ upgrading. That's your job, much more than the act of upgrading itself.
Unpublished vulnerabilities in old software are not a hypothetical. And very old packages are usually broken, just coped with at the expense of significant lost opportunity cost - or because the failure is a combination of rare and impactful that means once it happens everyone is out of job anyway.
Seriously, I've yet have to encounter a sysadmin using that old, silly adage at me and not later have to admit I was right.
Edit: so no, you don't stay on an ancient version of the database because "it's not broken." You're staying on it because _the upgrade process itself_ is so broken you're terrified of it.
Old software is not necessarily broken, but it is always a tech debt. And you can't live in debt forever, our IT does not work this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
It's often lower risk to apply frequent smaller changes than wait years for one enormous "bundled" upgrade.
If you are "fixing" a Schroedinger's Cat, my dude the Supreme Court of the Universe will not be kind.