Re: PoC: true in-place major version upgrades

On Mon, Nov 02, 2026 at 07:57:02PM +0700, John Naylor wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 2:00 AM Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> it's just software and almost anything is possible, but in this case I
>> suspect it comes with a huge amount of complexity, ongoing maintenance
>> burden, and really weird trade-offs.
>
> And yet, many DBMS's are able to do it, so any theory about how
> impossibly hard it is has to explain that fact.

As Tom alluded upthread, I think the main factor is that we (a relatively
small group of committers) have thus far been unwilling to take on the
maintenance cost and/or the restrictions on catalog changes that come with
it. I suspect this project becomes a whole lot more feasible if we can
find a way to minimize those.

> It should be table stakes for a DBMS that aspires to be enterprise-grade.

Agreed. I think many, many users would be happy to have this feature.

--
nathan