Question

Can a DB standby node have a different version than the primary?

We have a our database managed by DigitalOcean and a few days ago whilst our DB was overloaded we got a peculiar error in our Rails project which after looking into it quite a bit the only thing that I believe could have explained it, is if the standby node has a different DB version than the primary node. Is this possible in DO?

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to our DO stack at work, to check what exactly happened, but this question is more about curiosity than fixing the bug since it only happened once under very strange conditions.

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Dikshith Shetty • October 22, 2020
Accepted Answer

Hey there,

No, it’s not possible and Standby nodes are exact copies of the primary node (including DB version) that automatically take over if the primary node fails. You might have to look into it further to find the root cause but that won’t be the reason for sure.

If you have any logs or behavior which you can explain then you can reach out to support for more clarity.

-Dikshith

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Liam • September 29, 2021

Yes, for MySQL databases at least. I have had a primary node fail, and it automatically switched over to a standby.

The version of MySQL server changed from 8.0.20 to 8.0.23 .

Therefore the standby node had been already at a different version to the primary.

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