On Thursday 01 May 2008 01:30, Greg Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, Robert Treat wrote:
> > Whenever anyone posts a problem on 7.3, the first thing people do now
> > days is jump up and down waving thier arms about while exclaiming how
> > quickly they should upgrade. While I am certain there are even older
> > versions of postgres still running in production out there, I'd have to
> > say that the core developers for this project do not release software
> > with the expectation that you will use if for more than 5 years.
>
> You could easily make a case that 7.3 wasn't quite mature enough overall
> to be useful for 5 years. There's little reason to keep pumping support
> effort into something with unfixable flaws. I know when I was using 7.4
> heavily, I never felt like that was something I could keep going for that
> long; the VACUUM issues in particular really stuck out as something I
> wouldn't be likely to handle on future hardware having larger databases.
>
> 8.1, on the other hand, is the first release I thought you could base a
> long-term effort on, and 8.2 and 8.3 have moved further in that direction.
> 8.1 has been out for 2.5 years now, and it seems like it's got plenty of
> useful left in it still (except on Windows). The improvements in 8.2 and
> 8.3 are significant but not hugely important unless you're suffering
> performance issues.
>
> Compare with 7.3, which came out at the end of 2002. By 2.5 years after
> that, the project was well into 8.0, which was clearly a huge leap.
> PITR, tablespaces, whole new buffer strategy, these are really fundamental
> and compelling rather than the more incremental improvements coming out
> nowadays.
>
This all sounds nice, but I don't see any movement from the project to
increase community commitment to 5 years for any release, so I think it's all
moot.
> (Obligatory Oracle comparison: for customers with standard support
> levels, Oracle 8.1 was EOL'd after slightly more than 4 years. It wasn't
> until V9 that they pushed that to 5 years)
>
And even that isn't full support. IIRC Oracle certified applications can only
be done within the first 3 years of the product. I think there are other
scenarios under 5 years as well.
--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL
