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Has anyone migrated Hubzilla's database from MySQL/MariaDB to PostgreSQL?

2025-04-10 12:51:27

Hubzilla Support Forum

adminsforum@hubzilla.org

Mark Nowiasz wrote the following post Thu, 10 Apr 2025 12:43:55 +0200

Has anyone migrated Hubzilla's database from MySQL/MariaDB to PostgreSQL?

@!Hubzilla Support Forum

Has anyone (successfully) migrated Hubzilla's database from MySQL/MariaDB to PostgreSQL?

I'm just toying with the idea, because I've got an hunch the PostgreSQL would be a better choice for Hubzilla, feels like it's more efficient and so on.

One possible way would be using [url]=https://github.com/dimitri/pgloader[pgloader/url]. However, since it's only one way and no way back I wouldn't even consider trying it if there are potential problems migrating - I've got a (private) test hub so I could test this, but there's a huge difference between migrating test data and migrating a very large hub with lots of users, which I don't want to endanger in any form.

If it's uncertain that such a migration would be perfectly safe I won't even consider doing it, so - has anyone done this before?

show all 13 comments

2025-04-12 17:17:22

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

@Mark Nowiasz No, I didn't - which is mainly because I didn't check at all. The only reason was that I already ran a Postgres instance and only used MySQL (or maybe MariaDB - don't remember) for Hubzilla, so I wanted everything on the same database.

2025-04-13 12:27:54

Mark Nowiasz

buckaroo@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Beni Grind ~HB9HNT Thanks. I've got similar reasons, at the moment I'm using mariadb and PostgreSQL on different servers and I'm thinking about migrating the mariadb to PostgreSQL. Currently I'm running three large instances, one Mariadb (hub.netzgemeinde.eu), the other two (hubzilla.org and hubzilla.de) using PostgreSQL (17.4).

I've got a feeling/hunch that PostgreSQL is better suited for Hubzilla, especially on large hubs. However, migrating a large Mariadb (approx 130 GB) could be risky, there are lot of users depending on the hub and if there's no perfomance gain it's not worth making the effort.

Anyway, if I do this it'll be not very soon, I have to take time, tests and carefully consider doing that

2025-04-25 15:52:56

Mark Nowiasz

buckaroo@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

After much deliberation I've decided against doing that - I've got some new servers (arm64) and will migrate hub.netzgemeinde.eu to one of the new ones (no worries, this will go smoothly, it's not the first migration I've done with Netzgemeinde :-) ). Since Hubzilla will be the only application running on the server and an additional postgresql won't be needed, there's no point in migrating the database to postgres - it's too risky with no real gain. I'd try doing if it's my own hub, but there a lots of users and the hub is one of the directory servers, so fooling around with the database would be quite reckless.

Still I'm curious if this could be done in a 100% safe way :-)