[CentOS-devel] Upgrading postgresql (Re: CentOS/RHEL 5.3)

Thu Jan 22 17:09:08 UTC 2009
Joshua Kramer <josh at globalherald.net>

> I consider that a major upstream bug.
> Better would be for postgresql to ship a standalone SQL dumper, which can
> read old file formats.

Charlie,

Would you expect a "simple" upgrade of Oracle 10i to Oracle 11, for your 
major enterprise application?  Or, MS-SQL 2005 to MS-SQL 2008?

Any major database version upgrade requires the attention of a qualified 
DBA who knows how to test data and applications against the new DB 
version, and then dump/upgrade/restore.

For example, PostgreSQL introduced some minor syntactical differences with 
8.3.  If your application uses the features affected by these changes, it 
would be impossible to simply 'dump/restore' without some massaging of the 
data and the application.

PostgreSQL does ship with a dumper, pg_dump.  If you have the current 
version of postmaster, then you use pg_dump to connect to that and dump 
your data in a version-agnostic format.  IMHO, the effort of writing a 
standalone dumper that can recognize all the old file formats is not worth 
it, because it is a mistake to delete the old version of postmaster off 
your system before you've done a dump of the database.

Cheers,
-Josh

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