snacktime wrote:
Anyone have any tips for minimizing downtime when upgrading? So far we have done upgrades during scheduled downtimes. Now we are getting to the point where the time required for a standard dump/restore is just too long. What have others done when downtime is critical? The only solution we have been able to come up with is to migrate the data on a per user basis to a new database server. Each user is a merchant, and the data in the database is order data. Migrating one merchant at a time will keep the downtime per merchant limited to just the time it takes to migrate the data for that merchant, which is acceptable.
The other option would be to run replication, e.g. slony to migrate from one version to another. I've done it and it works fine, but it will mean slony adding its own tables to each database. I'd still do it one merchant at a time, but that should reduce your downtime to seconds.
-- Richard Huxton Archonet Ltd
