Supported PostgreSQL versions?

[Mark Janse]

Good morning,

We recently migrated our XNAT to a more modern machine. Next step on our list is a database migration and upgrading XNAT itself to 1.8.10.

At the moment we are still running postgres 9.6 (I know...) and would like to upgrade it to the latest possible version. However, I can't find clear documentation on what the newest supported version is by XNAT. The XNAT database guide refers to postgres 12, but that one is EOL in 3 months, too. Preferably we'd upgrade to 16, is that version supported by XNAT 1.8.6 so we only have to migrate the database once?

Furthermore, every time we boot up XNAT we get like a gazillion recommended SQL queries and database scheme alterations that we are supposed to run. Not surprising as we've been operating the service for over twelve years now. I'm kinda wondering what experiences are with running these, as XNAT runs mostly stable for us so far and data loss is the last thing we want. Can we just run these blindly, and if so, why doesn't XNAT do that on an upgrade ;) ?

Best regards,

Mark Janse

Health-RI

[Rick Herrick]

Hi Mark,

We haven't done formal validation that I'm aware of on specific versions of PostgreSQL, but basically most upgrades from 10 onwards haven't had any breaking changes that I've seen. Flywheel is running 14 at large clients with no issues. We're also using 16 in testing and haven't had any problems there either. Our next release will be tested and validated on 16.

I'd recommend setting up a dev instance with 1.8.10 and PostgreSQL 16, import your database, start it up, and see how things go with some basic smoke tests.