On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 2:23 AM, Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@xxxxxx> wrote: > * Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@xxxxxxxxx> [2008-10-06 18:07:39 CEST]: >> On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Markus Wanner <markus@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > Well, it's a general Postgres problem, not a Debian one. Upgrading >> > between major versions requires a full dump/restore cycle, for which the >> > downtime is proportional to the database size. For small or medium >> > databases that's not an issue, but above some Gigabytes, that begins to >> > hurt pretty badly. >> >> In that case I prefer to have both db versions available and use slony >> to upgrade in place. We recently upgraded from 8.1 to 8.3 and work >> the downtime was measured in seconds (the time it took slony to switch >> the two servers). > > Good to hear. Though I see another problem here, slony is always only > available for a single postgres version in the current packaging, so > that upgrading path isn't that easy as you make it sound... At least not > if you want to do it on a single system and not through two different > machines. This is certainly not true for slony on ubuntu. On Ubuntu there's a slony1-bin package that has the common files, and then there's postgresql-8.x-slony1 package for each pgsql version that has the scripts to make that version happy.
