On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:58 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 08:46:33PM -0400, Lew wrote: >> upgrades to PG, it is our duty to inform our bosses of the risk of not >> upgrading, so they can properly assess risks and manage them accordingly. > > I agree. It is, by the same token, your duty to yourself to ensure > that, if the answer is, "No," you get that answer in writing so that > future failures are not possibly pinned on you as having been > negligent in installing stability and security releases. > > By the way, I always refer to these of late as "security and > stability" rather than "minor" releases. I do that because it > presents them to the target audience in a way that is understandable. > Those releases are, for the project, a maintenance burden and not a > way to introduce features. It's wise to keep that in mind when > presenting such releases to managers responsible for the decision. I used to work for an Oracle DBA and while he was quite smart in most ways, he really had been trained by Oracle to avoid anything but "patches". Upgrades / updates of a db were very scary for him. I had to present the minor updates as "patch releases" to get him comfortable with them. And have a full implementation plan and all that as well. But if instead he had insisted on running an outdated version of PostgreSQL for some goofy reason I would have been looking for another job. I guess I've been lucky in that I've never actually had to work for idiots. Sure have interviewed with quite a few though.
