A temporary upgrade boosts your cluster's specifications for a set period, then automatically reverts to the original configuration at the scheduled revert time. Use this to handle short-term traffic spikes—such as promotions, batch jobs, or seasonal peaks—without committing to a permanent configuration change.
Only subscription clusters support temporary upgrades. You can upgrade an entire cluster or individual nodes.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, ensure that you have:
A subscription cluster
No pending orders for renewal with a specification change or temporary upgrade on the cluster
A cluster that is not a PolarDB for PostgreSQL Distributed Edition cluster
Limitations
Both the upgrade and the revert process cause a transient disconnection of approximately 20 to 30 seconds. Make sure your application has a reconnection mechanism before proceeding.
Temporary downgrades are not supported.
The revert time cannot be later than one day before the cluster's expiration date. For example, if a cluster expires on January 10, the latest revert time is January 9.
During a temporary upgrade, you cannot automatically change specifications or add or remove read-only nodes. To perform these operations, first make the temporary upgrade permanent.
While the cluster is in the running state during a temporary upgrade, you can manually upgrade it again. See Manual upgrade.
The minimum duration is 1 hour. Because the revert time cannot be changed after it is set, the recommended maximum upgrade duration is 14 days.
If performance is still insufficient, or if you need more time, perform another upgrade before the revert time. The new revert time cannot be earlier than the original one.
Perform a temporary upgrade
Log in to the PolarDB console. In the left navigation pane, click Clusters. Select the region where the cluster is located, then find your cluster.
Go to the Change Configurations page using one of these methods:
In the Actions column for the cluster, click Change Configurations.
Click the cluster ID to open the Basic Information page. In the Database Nodes section, click Change Configurations.
On the Change Configurations page, select Temporary Upgrade and click OK.
In the dialog box, configure the following parameters.
Parameter Description Sub-series Target sub-series after the upgrade: General-purpose or Dedicated Node Target node specifications. At least one read-only node must match the primary node's specifications. Configure other nodes as needed. Database Proxy Type Database proxy type after the upgrade. Default: Dedicated Enterprise Edition Revert Time Time when the temporary upgrade expires and reverts. The revert time cannot be changed after it is set. The minimum duration is 1 hour, the recommended maximum is 14 days, and the revert time cannot be later than one day before the cluster's expiration date. Select the Terms of Service and click Buy Now.
On the Payment page, confirm the order and click Purchase.
Make a temporary upgrade permanent
If you decide to keep the upgraded specifications, make the upgrade permanent while the cluster is running. This prevents the automatic revert at the scheduled revert time.
Go to the Upgrade page and perform a manual upgrade to the current specifications.
This operation does not affect your services.
Upgrade primary and read-only nodes separately
PolarDB lets you set different specifications for the primary node and read-only nodes. This is useful when read traffic patterns differ significantly from write traffic, letting you right-size each node type independently.
Keep these constraints in mind:
At least one read-only node must have the same specifications as the primary node.
The memory of a read-only node cannot be less than half of the primary node's memory.
The minimum CPU specifications for read-only nodes depend on the primary node's CPU: For example, if your primary node has 16 cores, read-only nodes must have at least 8 cores—and at least one of them must match the primary at 16 cores.
Primary node CPU (cores) Minimum read-only node CPU (cores) 2 2 4 4 8 4 16 8 32 16 64 32 88 32
Billing
The cost of a temporary upgrade is 1.5 times the price difference between the new and old configurations, prorated by day:
Cost for N days = (Monthly price of new specifications - Monthly price of old specifications) / 30 x 1.5 x N
What's next
Manual upgrade — permanently change cluster specifications
Add or remove a read-only node — scale out by adding nodes after making the upgrade permanent