Re: Migrating from 8.3 to 8.4 on the same server

I've never tested pg_migrator... it appears a good candidate for your upgrade, although I think it will work over datafiles, so test it carefully with a replica of your database.

Slony is always an option. It's not very difficult to deploy, but you have to manually create the schema in target database and all tables must include a primary key or an unique index. So, it's not  fire and forget. :-)

We have recently migrated our Gforge database from 8.1 to 8.4. It took about 50 minutes for dump (20GB database into a 7.8GB dump) and 40 minutes for restore. You can speed your restore process if you restore first your schema WITHOUT indexes, then restore data, and finally create indexes. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Lewis Kapell <lkapell@setonhome.org>
To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Migrating from 8.3 to 8.4 on the same server
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:36:11 -0400

The database is about 12gb, the dump file is about 8gb.

I tested dump/restore into 8.4 on our test server, and it took an hour.  This is a virtualized server, but my sysadmin thinks the performance 
on our live server (not virtual) would be comparable.

It wouldn't kill us to have two or three hours of down time, but I would 
like to avoid it.

Thank you,

Lewis Kapell
Computer Operations
Seton Home Study School



On 4/14/2010 4:28 PM, Iñigo Martinez Lasala wrote:
> How big is your database?
>
> If not very big, a pg_dump/pg_restore will be your best option. 8.3 to
> 8.4 is not a traumatic upgrade. In fact, it's really easy and probably
> you won't need to change your database schema.
> And pg_restore in 8.4 is really FAST (compared with previous versions).