The Barman is ready for PostgreSQL 10

Today our Devops team at 2ndQuadrant, led by my dear friend and trusted colleague Marco Nenciarini, released version 2.3 of Barman.

The main news is that this release has been thoroughly tested to work on the upcoming PostgreSQL 10. This major release of PostgreSQL has completely changed naming conventions for one of the most important concepts of crash recovery and replication: the WAL file.

So far, the name ‘xlog’ was widely used to refer to transactional logs. In PostgreSQL 10, the global development team has decided to use the term WAL file more consistently. This decision has effected the name of several functions, views, directories and applications. For more details, please refer to PostgreSQL 10 release notes.

The Barman development team has decided to adopt the same naming convention, while transparently maintaining compatibility with previous versions of PostgreSQL from 8.3.

As a final note, another important piece of news: I am stepping down from project leader of Barman, due to my increasing responsibility within 2ndQuadrant.

This is indeed the very first release of Barman that hasn’t been led by myself. The project leadership has been taken over by Marco Nenciarini, a very well known member of our community and respected Debian developer. Having known Marco for almost two decades, I am sure that the project is in very good hands. In any case, I will continue supporting Barman and help with its future development and direction.

“In bocca al lupo, Marco!” (equivalent of good luck to Marco, in Italian).

P.S. If you’re reading this article and you do not have a continuous backup and recovery infrastructure for PostgreSQL, with systematic procedure, please take the time to start planning it now. Just today, during our support operations, I encountered another case of an issue on a PostgreSQL database with no backups in place. Believe me, you do not want to be there. And when you find yourself in that situation, be sure of one thing: you will wish you had thought about this earlier, but … now it is too late.

To learn more about Backup Strategy and Disaster Recovery, check 2ndQuadrant’s Training Courses here.