Re: Pains in upgrading to 8.3

Dave Page wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Tony Caduto
>  wrote:
>> paul rivers wrote:
>>  >>
>>  > Going from 8.2.4 and 8.2.6 to 8.3.0 has been painless for me.
>>  > However, unlike the blogger you cite, I read the directions before,
>>  > not after, attempting it.
>>
>>
>>  The blogger has a point about pg_dump and restore, it could be much
>>  better, for example
>>  the backup process could be part of the server core and instead of
>>  having a fat client where most of the process is running on the client,
>>  a API could be
>>  used where the backup is generated on the server and then have options
>>  where it could be left on the server or transferred to the clients PC.
> 
> Not really an option - the reason it's recommended to use the new
> pg_dump version with the older server when upgrading is to allow the
> dump to be made in the way most compatible with the new server,
> effectively doing some of the upgrade process as part of the dump
> operation.

For the case of upgrading, it wouldn't work. But there are certainly 
other cases where it would help. Say from your central pgadmin console 
administering 10 servers from 3 different major release trees :-(

It can be done with commandline pg_dump, but it means you have to have 
three different installs on your management or backup or whatever 
machine. Those cases would certainly be easier if you could just call a 
backup API on the server that would feed you the data... (yes, there are 
ways to do it with ssh tunneling and whatever, but that's yet another 
external service that has to be set up and configured)

I'm not saying it's worth the work and potential downsides, just that 
there are clear upsides :-)

//Magnus