Hey folks,
You’ve no doubt noticed us knocking the dust off our unmanaged Postgres and sanding off its rough edges. Notably, recently we added enhanced WAL archiving and remote restores backed by our good friends at Tigris. We’ve just upgraded our postgres-flex image to Postgres 16.3, so as of today, any newly-created databases start out on the latest and presumably greatest version.
If you’re like me and don’t know your Postgres 16 from your, well, Postgres 15 (please do me the courtesy of imagining something far more clever there), here are the release notes. Hey, it came out on my birthday. Nice of them to do that!
What does this mean for me?
Existing databases won’t be changed in any way–we’ll only provision 16 on new clusters. Existing databases can be upgraded to 16 by creating a new cluster and importing the old database. I’d tell you how to do that myself, but community member erk figured it out and wrote up fairly clear instructions (thanks!) Once your cluster is upgraded, the regular fly image update procedure has you covered for minor Postgres version bumps within the 16 series. Also note that you don’t have to upgrade, but you do have a path forward if the time ever comes.
If you still need Postgres 15, it’s still available. You’ll want to use the --image-ref flag on any flyctl commands creating a cluster, restoring one, etc. Use an image reference in a format like flyio/postgres-flex:15 to upgrade to the latest available version of Postgres 15 (E.g. fly pg create ... --image-ref flyio/postgres-flex:15.)
We hope you enjoy all this new Postgres goodness, and please let us know what you think!