AWS RDS PostgreSQL Minor Update

Question

I am a bit confused about how to perform a minor PostgreSQL version update on AWS RDS.

I read multiple articles from AWS documentation:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/12/amazon-rds-enhances-auto-minor-version-upgrades/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.Upgrading.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.Upgrading.html

None of them pointed me to the exact command or set of instructions necessary to perform the minor update released in early August 2019.

I fully understand that major updates can be performed from the AWS Console -> Modify section of the RDS DB Instance or from the AWS CLI.

I even did a search on the available engine versions for Postgres:

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions --engine postgres

And this command only outputs major engine versions, and the latest one is "PostgreSQL 11.4-R1", the one I use.

I am aware that minor updates can be enabled during the maintenance period, but I did not see any minor updates applied.

The lastest August release is crucial four our DB instance because it solves a couple of bugs we have reported regarding PG 11 Partitioning.

Is there a way to perform a manual version update on RDS for Postgres? Locally I updated the PG engine and all works fine.

Thank you and have a great day!

Answer 1

In the RDS console, when you go to the database details and view the "Maintenance & backups" tab, there is a section that displays if there are pending maintenance tasks. Here's a screenshot of a database that has a pending maintenance task:

If there are no pending maintenance tasks that will say "none" instead of "available". If there are no pending maintenance tasks then your database should be running the latest version. If there are pending maintenance tasks, then you can manually initiate the maintenance tasks anytime you want, which should update your database to the latest minor version if it isn't already updated.

I don't have a PostgreSQL RDS instance to test this on, but you could try running SELECT version(); on the database to get the current version, which might indicate the minor release version.

I don't see any other way to get to the minor version unfortunately, so you may have to open an AWS support ticket to get them to tell you what version the DB instance is running.

Answer 2

You will need to change the maintenance window to the earliest time.

AWS doesn't allow us to manually trigger the minor update process.