Upgrade from PostgreSQL 15 to 17 on Windows using pg_upgrade

November 10, 2024

Overview

At work I needed to upgrade from PostgreSQL from 15 to 17. The process is not that different than upgrading in Ubuntu but there were a couple of items that threw me off.

Perform Backup

This should be done prior to the update in case something goes wrong:

CTyler@CTYLER_NB  C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\17\bin  [08:22]  
❯ & 'C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\17\bin\pg_dumpall.exe' -p 5432 -U postgres -f D:\Backups\postgresql-ctyler_nb-20241107-1.out

This was based on the documentation PostgreSQL: Documentation: 17: pg_dumpall.

Note keep in mind that you should create a pgpass.conf (or .pgpass for Linux):

# server:port:database:user_name:password
*:5432:*:postgres:YOUR_PASSWORD

This file is located C:\Users\ctyler\AppData\Roaming\postgresql (or chmod 0600 ~/.pgpass with the right permissions). PostgreSQL: Documentation: The Password File.

Remove admipack extension

This extension will need to be removed as it have been deprecated:

christopher@CTYLERNB:~$ psql -U postgres  
postgres@ctyler_nb:postgres> DROP EXTENSION adminpack CASCADE;  
You're about to run a destructive command.  
Do you want to proceed? (y/n): y  
Your call!  
DROP EXTENSION  
Time: 0.009s  
postgres@ctyler_nb:postgres> \q  
Goodbye!

Stop Both Servers

Go to Start->Search->Serivces and stop both services: Stop both PostgreSQL servers

Update pg_hba.conf

Make the following changes:

# IPv4 local connections:
# host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            scram-sha-256
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
# IPv6 local connections:
# host    all             all             ::1/128                 scram-sha-256
host    all             all             ::1/128                 trust

This remove the permissions so that you don’t error during upgrade. This need to be done on both clusters.

Run pg_upgrade

Now let’s perform the upgrade. Open PowerShell as Adminstrator.

❯ cd "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\17\bin"
❯  .\pg_upgrade.exe --old-datadir "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/15/data" --new-datadir "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/17/data" --old-bindir "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/15/bin" --new-bindir "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/17/bin" --old-port=5432 --new-port=5433 -U postgres

I had to add ports and postgres user. I got this info from Upgrading PostgreSQL in Windows · GitHub Once complete you should get:

Upgrade Complete
----------------
Optimizer statistics are not transferred by pg_upgrade.
Once you start the new server, consider running:
    C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/17/bin/vacuumdb -U postgres --all --analyze-in-stages
Running this script will delete the old cluster's data files:
    delete_old_cluster.bat
CTyler@CTYLER_NB  C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\17\bin ❯ .\vacuumdb.exe -U postgres --all --analyze-in-stages

Next Steps

After you verify that PostgreSQL 17 works as intended, you can then remove 15. I would suggest having a backup strategy. For example on Ubuntu, I use ZFS to create snapshots and push those snapshots to a backup server and an external hard disk. On Windows, I have a simple PowerShell script that will use pg_dump and pg_dumpall. pg_dump is for the tables that I need to backup monthly. Most of the data in my databases come from other data sources and don’t really need to be backed up.

The total downtime was only a couple of hours and I shouldn’t have a reason not to upgrade PostgreSQL yearly.

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