"just use postgres" should be tattood on every junior engineer right out of college
Surely you mean MySQL / MariaDB.
With Postgres I literally have to re-read docs every time there is a major version upgrade because I need to remind myself how to dump the database and re-import it into the new version because it's 2025 and Postgres still hasn't come up with a way to not have you do this.
(You should be checking for regressions and behavior changes in your app, too, but you always need to do that. Have a QA database.)
I have _one_ database, not a cluster. I back it up every day anyway.
You're telling me I have to specifically use Debian, and have a cluster, to get a good experience out of Postgres?
Doesn't sound very boring to me.
Second, important point: yes, you should use Debian because Debian has consistently provided the upgrade-in-place experience that PG has lacked until.... just now, actually.
Third point that you didn't ask about: you should learn a little about PG tuning, because on day 1, the config is tuned appropriately for your Sun Ultra 5 workstation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_5/10
(I am slightly exaggerating, but you should investigate anyway.)
Just for context, I run Postgres on an OpenBSD host (will probably be FreeBSD in the near future) to back an instance of davical which is a caldav server used by a total of two people.
I will keep tuning in mind if I ever actually use Postgres for anything significant but for now it seems like it would probably be wasted effort.
While I'd agree that Debian is boring, it still seems to me that Postgres isn't, even with this in place upgrade tooling. I still have to remember a specific upgrade command special to Postgres.
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade77.html
https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/databases/postg...