> Maybe I'm some crazy, radical DBA, but I've never had a version of > pgsql get EOLed out from underneath me. I migrated from 7.4 to 8.1 > right around the time 8.2 came out then upgraded to 8.2 around 6 > months later. > > Where I work now we are looking at migrating from 8.1 to 8.2 or 8.3 > (depending on whether or not we have the man power to fix a few issues > with type coercion, our app, and 8.3) These aren't "the DBA got a > wild hair and just had to upgrade" upgrades. Each time I've migrated > it's been because there were performance or maintenance issues that > were solved by upgrading. Perhaps I'm in a unique situation as well, but as the DBA of a data-tank style DB, I haven't had a problem at all finding opportunities to upgrade to later versions of postgresql. My schema isn't all that complicated; it's just a very large amount of data and some very complex queries on that data- but the queries have been kept to extremely standard SQL specifically for migration and cross-platform reasons. It's definitely been annoying on occasion to find that I need to do a dump and restore to move to a new version, but at the same time cheap, large storage is extremely inexpensive when compared to the sort of storage acceptable for day-to-day use, so size isn't generally a problem- just dump to a big, cheap disk and then restore. I'm probably lucky in that I manage a shop that can tolerate a day's downtime for such a situation, but at the same time, we also demand the most from database performance for complex queries, so a day's downtime here could easily save many days' worth of query time down the line. 8.3, FWIW, was particularly attractive in this regard. I couldn't quite justify upgrading to the release candidates, but the performance improvements were pretty tempting. -- - David T. Wilson david.t.wilson@xxxxxxxxx
