Re: Why dump/restore to upgrade?

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, mlw wrote:

> > We will never make such a commitment, at least not in the foreseeable
> > future.
>
> Here's the problem. If you have a database that is in service, you can
> not upgrade postgres on that machine without taking it out of service
> for the duration of a backup/restore. A small database is not a big
> deal, a large database is a problem. A system could be out of service
> for hours.
>
> For a mission critical installation, this is really unacceptable.

Cheap solution: replication.  Bring up a slave with the
new version.  Do the initial sync.  Wait for a quiet
time, and switch over (possibly still replicating to
the old one so you can revent the upgrade).

The overhead would be fairly high, but it's a cheap way
to get the required properties, and is easy to revert.

Matthew.