Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Now Supports Multi Major Version Upgrades to PostgreSQL 11

Posted on: Apr 16, 2019

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Multi Major Version Upgrades for PostgreSQL which allows you to perform major version upgrades across multiple different major versions.

Previously, major version upgrades could only be done to one higher version at a time. For example, PostgreSQL version 9.6 could only be upgraded to PostgreSQL 10, and PostgreSQL version 9.4 to PostgreSQL version 9.5. So, if you wanted to upgrade your older instances to the latest major version, you would have to perform multiple major version upgrades until you reached your target version. For example, upgrading PostgreSQL 9.4 to PostgreSQL 11 involved upgrading from version 9.4 to 9.5, then 9.5 to 9.6, and then 9.6 to 10 and finally from 10 to 11. This caused extended downtime for each of the upgrade operations.

With the new multi major version upgrade feature you can perform any of the following upgrades seamlessly in a single step, thus reducing downtime substantially.

  • Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.4 to PostgreSQL version 11
  • Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.5 to PostgreSQL version 11
  • Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.6. to PostgreSQL version 11

In addition, if you are still running any PostgreSQL version 9.3 which has already been out of support, you can upgrade your instance(s) to 9.5 or 9.6 directly.

Please refer to the major version upgrade documentation on details around the PostgreSQL versions that are supported as source and target versions and also any limitations associated with the upgrade process.

With this release, RDS for PostgreSQL now also supports upgrading from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 11.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for pricing details and regional availability.