Apologies for something which is distro related, but I was bitten by a "silly mistake"- one of my own, I hasten to say- earlier.
Several legacy programs written in Delphi ground to a halt this morning, which turned out to be because a Debian system had updated its copy of PostgreSQL and restarted the server, which broke any live connections.
At least some versions of Delphi, not to mention other IDE/RAD tools with database-aware components, don't automatically try to reestablish a database session that's been interrupted. In any event, an unexpected server restart (irrespective of all investment in UPSes etc.) has the potential of playing havoc on a clustered system.
Is there any way that either the package maintainer or a site administrator/programmer such as myself can mark the Postgres server packages as "manual upgrade only" or similar? Or since I'm almost certainly not the first person to be bitten by this, is there a preferred hack in mitigation?
Certainly. Unrelated to PostgreSQL, this is a standard feature in Debian. Commonly used to prevent things like kernel upgrades from happening on the same schedule as others.