All services to be offline on Tuesday, November 20

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 9:19 am

I wanted to post notice that all services will be offline on Tuesday, November 20. As we have done the past three years, we will be performing our major upgrades on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The yearly maintenance this year will include upgrading Postgres from version 9.6 to version 11. Version 11 provides significant performance improvements that will be necessary to have available before the next bubble starts. We expect this to be the most massive upgrade we have ever performed.

This upgrade will require us to rewrite about 3TB of data in a new database format. The data is in about 5 billion rows, and therefore we expect the outage to last about 12 hours. Unfortunately, we're not aware of any way to perform an online upgrade, because the cost of creating a duplicate system would be $5,000, and even if we could create one, Postgres does not provide a way to partially upgrade a database. Even if it did, the system would need to be taken offline to set up the duplicate system anyway.

Chris will provide more news about this major upgrade over the next two months.