Database Stack End of Life Announcements

Over the last year we’ve focused on aggressively expanding our database stack. With PostgreSQL 9.0, 9.1 and MySQL 5.1 and 5.5 available we’ve provided customers with many options and upgrade paths. We’d like to continue growing our stack and introduce new enhancements and features … but in order to move forward, we need to leave some things behind.

Today we are announcing the End of Life (EOL) for two existing database versions that are entering (or have entered) the EOL phase from their respective communities. We strive to follow best practices so this means that we’ll be deprecating PostgreSQL 8.3 at the beginning of 2013, and MySQL 5.0 at the end of 2013.

Due to the high number of customers using MySQL 5.0, we will focus on providing additional upgrade paths and documentation. We’ll keep you informed on our progress; we are planning a series of blogposts to help you migrate off 5.0 starting next year.

Keep in mind that there are many benefits to upgrading to the latest version of the database you love. Newer versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL come with significant performance enhancements, features, and optimizations. For example: Postgres 9.1 and 9.2 allow you to take advantage of full-text search, flexible replication, extensions, indexes, and datatypes. MySQL 5.5 offers you a completely re-architected InnoDB engine, improved recovery, performance, and additional replication modes.

No action is immediately required but the sooner you begin evaluating your migration to a newer version the better. Engine Yard will be contacting customers who currently have environments running Postgres 8.3 in order to discuss options and timelines.

At a high level, the different options available for customers are:

• Perform the migration yourself by [backing up](https://support.cloud.engineyard.com/entries/20996681-back-up-the-database) and [restoring](https://support.cloud.engineyard.com/entries/20996676-restore-or-load-a-database) your database to a later version.
• Contact Engine Yard [Professional Services](http://www.engineyard.com/services) in order to have the migration performed on your behalf.