Upgrading PostgreSQL 16 to 18 with zero downtime: the whole runbook
A major version upgrade with a write pause measured in seconds, not an outage measured in hours. The plan, the preflight queries that catch what will bite you, building the new cluster from a standby with pg_createsubscriber, the sequence trap, schema changes during the window, the cutover script through PgBouncer, a rollback you can actually take, and what PostgreSQL 19 removes from this list.
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