Why should you consider upgrading Postgres again?

As title suggests,  if you are running Postgres in your environment, it is very important that you plan to upgrade Postgres with the latest announced release.

I upgraded Postgres recently in last couple of weeks. Should I upgrade again? Why?

Yes, you should plan to upgrade again.

Postgres released data corruption and security bug fix release on May 22nd and follow up release on June 4th to fix some of the issue introduced in previous release. However, the June 4th release did not fix the  multixact wraparound bugs (Thread1, Thread2 ) introduced in recent versions.  The wraparound bug could cause problem starting Postgres after the crash , so it is critical to apply. The wraparound bug is more critical for 9.3 & 9.4 but it is very good idea to upgrade for other versions to make sure there isn’t any problem. Read the release notes for the further details/explanation.

Special care should be taken regarding vacuuming , if you ever ran Postgres 9.3 version and used pg_upgrade for the production databases.

What if I run Postgres 8.X (8.1,8.2,8.3.8.4) ?

Yes, absolutely!!  You are running EOL or unsupported version of Postgres. It is very important that you upgrade Postgres database to supported release  because it is most likely to hit any or all of the  security and/or data loss bugs fixed in recent Postgres releases.

What if I run Postgres 9.X  but have not applied the the latest minor release?

Yes, you should upgrade to the latest minor release (3rd digit in version numbering). The minor release only requires installing new binaries and restart the database.  It does _not_ require to use pg_dump/restore or pg_upgrade.

You should be upgrading to the following latest relevant Postgres release for your environment ASAP:

• 9.4.4
• 9.3.9
• 9.2.13
• 9.1.18
• 9.0.22

How can I keep track of the supported Postgres releases?

Postgres releases support can be found here. It is worth to note that , if you are running Postgres 9.0,  you should plan for major version upgrade (most likely to latest Postgres 9.4.X release)  before the holidays season begin because  Postgres 9.0.X will be EOL or unsupported by September,2015.

Hope this will help to convince your manager(s) for the Postgres database upgrade!