Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> writes:
> I would upgrade to either 8.2 or 9.0 and here's my reasons. with 8.2
> you still have implicit casts, which your application may depend upon.
> Most other changes between 7.4 and 8.2 were pretty small, so if
> you've got a lot of implicit casts in your SQL, 8.2 will be the least
> painful of the upgrades to late model pgsqls. HOWEVER, 8.2 is getting
> pretty old now and performance wise 9.0 will pretty handily beat it.
> In terms of stability, there are no reports of any versions after
> about 8.1 or 8.2 being particularly unstable, but keep in mind that
> support for 8.1 and 8.2 will be ending / may have ended already, so if
> you can possibly test against 9.0 and see if it works well enough,
> then you should really do so.
See:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Release_Support_Policy
8.1 is dead already, 8.2 will go off life support this December.
So if you're getting involved in a major-version upgrade now, you
really owe it to yourself to jump to 8.4 or later. IMO anyway.
(FWIW, I know of no reason to think that 8.4->9.0 is a bigger jump
than any other major-release bump from the application compatibility
standpoint. Scott is correct to identify the removal of some implicit
casts-to-text in 8.3 as the single largest pain point we've introduced
in recent memory. Personally I'm betting that this will be eclipsed
by the shift to standard_conforming_strings=on in 9.1 ...)
regards, tom lane