Versioning Policy

This document describes the versioning policy that we try to follow in the DBOD service for the PostgreSQL instances. It is our intention to adjust to it as much as possible.

For PostgreSQL, a new major version is published every year, just before mid-November, as can be seen at https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/. Each version is supported for 5 years. At least one minor release for all/each supported major release is released every quarter, with all the latest bug and security fixes. Additional minor releases are released, unscheduled, only if necessary, due to security or very serious bugs.

We integrate in DBOD the latest major version only when it has been available for at least one year (after 5/6 minor releases) to avoid instability and mitigate the risks of early adoption. We remove the oldest version just before/after it becomes unsupported. So a major version should be available up to 4 years at max. Because of this, in the longer term, we will have to support up to 3-4 major versions at the same time. We integrate and ask to apply the latest minors once per year, instead of every quarter.

In this scenario, if an instance is ALWAYS on the oldest supported major version, it will need to go through a major upgrade every year, but if a user upgrades to the latest major version available (instead of the next major), he/she will not be forced to do another major upgrade for a few years (up to 3/4), until the latest version is, in turn, deprecated. For PG, the general advice is to go with the latest version you can afford to be, because of the benefits in terms of performance improvements, security and bug fixes, even when new features are not tremendously interesting.

The following picture may help you to understand the support timeline for current and future PostgreSQL releases in the DBOD service:

In summary, we force a minor upgrade, which normally consist in the restart of the instance, once per year (or, exceptionally, when required for security or serious bugs). Minor upgrades normally do not require changes in the application. Once per year, we have also to deprecate unsupported versions. Next time this will happen (for PG 13) around November 13th, 2025. Whenever possible, we plan to make this occurring in the same period, so that our users are able to major upgrade to the latest version, without requiring the upgrade to a new minor version, until one year is passed.