bitur mail <biturmail@gmail.com> writes:
> I was wondering if there would be a problem using Postgres 8.4 for my Rails
> development database and Postgres 8.1 for my production database.
You can do it, if you're into pain ;-).
In the first place, there are quite a lot of features in 8.4 that aren't
in 8.1. So you'll be frequently tripping over stuff that works fine in
your devel environment and fails when you put it in production.
The same goes from a performance standpoint: some queries that perform
well in 8.4 won't in 8.1.
And lastly, 8.1 will be EOL'd and no longer supported by the end of this
year. So you really need to be thinking about migrating your production
DB to something newer, anyway.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Release_Support_Policy
regards, tom lane