Chris --
You asked
I'm currently using 7.4 and I trying find out what the value/advantage
of upgrading to a more recent version and to which version.
Eventually 7.4 will not be supported (there's discussion elsewhere on how to
deal with 7.3), so it would pay to move off of it well before that time
(admittedly a year or more off, at a guess).
As another poster pointed out, the release notes indicate improvements that
have been made, some of which are not ported back to earlier releases. These
include stability improvements, often speed improvements (depending on your
useage) and new features or better integration of existing ones (autovacuum
seems much better in 8.2 than 8.1, and 8.3 seems even better; the integration
of tsearch2 into the core in 8.3; easier quoting in stored procedures, etc.).
The jump from 7.4.x to 8.x is proving a challenge for us since we have one set
of databases still on 7.4.14 (whatever the latest and greatest point release
is); they will benefit from the upgrade, but the old databases accepted some
bad UTF characters and the newer postgreses (postgresii ?) are stricter about
bad data and reject them, so there's some clean up involved. Other than that
upgrades have been relatively painless (7.4 -- 8.1.x -- 8.2 now).
HTH,
Greg Williamson
Senior DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC, a DigitalGlobe company
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