Postgres upgrade in ArcGIS Enterprise Portal

[zaphod]

Good afternoon all!  

We inherited an ArcGIS Enterprise Portal installaton tied to arcservers and a postgres server.  We're about to go through a postgres upgrade.  I hope this isn't a dumb question, but what does the portal use the postgres database for outside of hosted data, webmaps and layers?  Does the Portal application itself need the database? We've found if we turn off the postgres server, most maps work outside of ones that use our hosted data.  Are there other things we should be testing when upgrading postgres that would be tied to the database?  User logins, certain application types working, some kind of configs....  We just wanted to check before jumping headfirst into this.  

[RyanUthoff]

Getting the terminology correct here is pretty important. When you say "postgres server", I am assuming you are referring to the ArcGIS Data Store from how you are describing it. Under the hood, the ArcGIS Data Store is a postgres DB. However, this is not a DB you should ever directly interact with. 

If you are in fact referring to the ArcGIS Data Store, you should NOT upgrade the version of postgres. Any upgrades should ONLY be done through ArcGIS Data Store upgrades (like going from 11.4 to 11.5). Sometimes the ArcGIS Data Store upgrade will also upgrade the version of postgres, but you should never independently upgrade postgres.

To answer your question about how Portal uses the postgres DB, it's typically only used for hosted feature services. It makes sense that when you shut it off, that only hosted feature services stop working.