[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Time to increase the minimum required version of PostgreSQL?

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

The patch for bug 1789679 has inspired me to pose a question: is it time to
bump up the minimum required version of PostgreSQL?

Currently the minimum required Pg version for all supported versions of
Evergreen is 9.4. The last time we changed that requirement was in
September of 2017.

Pg 9.4 has official PostgreSQL community support through February of 2020,
less than a year away [1]. 9.5 ends in February 2021 and 9.6 in November of
2021.

Here's what is currently offered by Linux distributions we care about:

Debian oldstable (Jessie): 9.4
* though Jessie LTS will go end of life in June 2020
Debian stable (Stretch): 9.6
Debian testing (Buster): 11
Ubuntu 16.04LTS (Xenial): 9.5
Ubuntu 18.04LTS (Bionic): 10

However, for both Debian and Ubuntu, it's a very viable choice to use Pg's
APT repositories.

While the use of GROUP BY ROLLUP proposed in 1789679 is interesting, there
are also more compelling reasons to upgrade:

- Parallel execution of sequential scans, joins, and aggregates as of Pg 9.6
- Significant performance increases as of 9.6
- Improved query parallelism and performance improvements as of 10
- Parallelized hash joins and parallelized sequential scans
- Embedded transaction support in stored procedures as of 11

I propose that for Evergreen 3.4 we increase the minimum required version
to at least 9.6. We should also give serious thought to setting the minimum
to 10 or even 11. Thoughts?

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1789679
[2] https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Implementation and Services Manager
Equinox Open Library Initiative
phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
email:  gmc at equinoxInitiative.org
web:  https://equinoxInitiative.org
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
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