Pg_upgrade (documentation, presentation) was created in 1998 to allow in-place major version upgrades of Postgres. It was written as a shell script, as were many of our command-line administration tools at the time. (Postgres didn’t support Windows natively until 2005). In those early years, Postgres changed its on-disk format frequently in major releases, causing pg_upgrade to be only occasionally useful for major version upgrades (6.5, 7.1, disabled in 2002).
Postgres feature additions soon made the shell script method unworkable, and binary-upgrades were unsupported for many years. In 2006, EnterpriseDB took on the job of rewriting pg_upgrade in C, a task that had been discussed many years on the mailing lists — this email
thread, titled “Upgrading rant”, give you an idea of the tone of previous discussions.
In 2009, EnterpriseDB realized that a successful binary-upgrade utility had to be community-developed, so they changed the license from GPL to BSD and encouraged me to work with the community to improve the tool. In 2010, pg_upgrade was added to the official Postgres 9.0 release. Postgres 9.1 saw only performance improvements. Postgres 9.2 will improve the user interface and error reporting. It is significant that pg_upgrade has not required large changes to support new major releases, only minor improvements.
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The Evolution of Pg_upgrade
