Postgres maintenance

Prevent DDL operations before a database maintenance with disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags

During database maintenances, DDL statements should be ceased to avoid conflicts with the common maintenance operations like logical replication, maintenance DDLs, etc.. Each of these flags controls specific processes that can interfere with maintenance tasks:

• partition_manager_sync_partitions
• execute_batched_migrations_on_schedule
• execute_background_migrations
• database_reindexing
• database_async_index_operations
• database_async_foreign_key_validation
• database_async_index_creation

As the list of flags is quite extensive, and, each one needs to be manually disabled, a single feature flag called disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags was added, to prevent DDL statements from happening in the database.

The feature flag disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags can enable or disable all of these flags as a group. This flag:

• Prevents DDL operations from happening in the database.
• Gives better support during a maintenance window

Disable DDL operations before Postgres maintenance

To disable all DDL operations, set disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags feature flag to true:

/chatops run feature set disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags true

Re-enable DDL operations after Postgres maintenance

After maintenance is over, disable the disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags feature flag. If you do not, some processes will not be resumed:

/chatops run feature set disallow_database_ddl_feature_flags false