Re: Best Current Pratice Postgres upgrade 6.5-->7.2
On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 16:23, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 at 02:50 GMT, Henry Hollenberg penned:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a database running on potato using postgres 6.5 that I'd like
> > to upgrade to Woody running postgres 7.2.
...
> I believe the install notes say, somewhere, that it's best to do
> incremental jumps, so rather than doing 6.5->7.2 you would do every step
> in between. But my memory may be faulty ...
>
> A few weeks ago, I tried to convert my source install of 7.0 to 7.2, and
> even that seemed fraught with difficulty. To be honest, as I don't have
> an immediate need for a database, I ended up putting the conversion
> project on the back burner.
I say in the migration notes that large version jumps may cause
problems. However they are not guaranteed to cause problems. The main
difficulty is that pg_dump has been buggy in the past.
One important thing to remember is that you should keep your existing
software available in case you need to go back. I think there may be
places which still archive Debian packages of 6.5, but I don't have them
any more myself, so it's wise to make sure you've got that software safe
in case of need. If you need to provide a service, it's better to go
back to an old version while you get things sorted out than disable the
service altogether because you weren't prepared.
If there are problems, they may come from things' being dumped in the
wrong order. I don't think that a dump from 6.5 will contain bad SQL;
as far as I can remember, incompatibiities in language are only found in
earlier versions. All problems can be fixed by editing the dump file to
make it valid; the only difficulty is where the mass of data is large so
that the editing task is burdensome.
If you upgrade <=7.2 to >=7.3 it is a good thing to run the contrib
adddepends script, which will build the dependencies that are nowadays
created automatically for such things as triggers.
--
Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight, UK http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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