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> Migration is really only half the story, or not even that much. Every > time you move to a new Postgres version you have to do extensive work to > revalidate your application. If you don't do that you're just asking for > trouble. But it can be painful, expensive and disruptive. I know of > places where it can take weeks or months of effort. So the less often > you have to do it the better. This would be true even if we had had a > perfect working inplace upgrade mechanism for years, which as you and > Greg point out is not true. I don't agree with this - migration is much more important than you make out. Testing and validation can be a pain, but it can be done concurrently while your main production site is still chugging along and taking orders. At some point, however, migration *will* cause production downtime[1]. This is one of the Achilles' heel of Postgres, and I'm frankly surprised it has taken us this long to get pg_migrator to a somewhat working state. > I don't have any clients who don't/can't upgrade because they can't > manage the downtime, but I have more than one avoiding upgrade because > of revalidation costs. Well, I certainly had many clients who had major problems dealing with the implicit casts removed in 8.3, but there are also some in which the sheer size of the database is a factor as well. I think Robert Treat can probably chime in on some upgrade woes here too. [1] Okay, there are some tricks to work around this or severely minimize the downtime </Bucardo_plug>, but it's still a truism that upgrading versions is a pain and nearly always involves production downtime. - -- Greg Sabino Mullane g...@turnstep.com PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200912040846 http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iEYEAREDAAYFAksZEqMACgkQvJuQZxSWSsgGyACdEyfIqwFsFrt9ZnQ2DNPVYIWP j08AoK+cLC84HSjlIbzJY8Gz/gAa6D74 =AzuV -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers