On 10/7/07, Suresh Gupta VG <suresh.g@zensar.com> wrote:Hi Peter,
Thanks for your reply and to your colleague Scott. Can you pls explain below sentence marked in red.
- --------- ------------------ --------------------- As an alternative to Scott's suggestion (upgrading to the newest 7.4), you could update your postgresql installation to 8.2, or if you can wait a few months, 8.3. There are *huge* performance gains (I recently made a similar switch and everything is blazing fast). Please note that this will require a dump/restore of the data and more involved testing, so only do it if you can devote the time, money, and energy.
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Is 8.2 version is not free downloadable? What type of testing is required? Pls advice us.
Sorry about being ambiguous, 8.2 is still free, but it does have quite a few changes from 7.4, so it will take time to update your configuration, recompile/reinstall postgres, dump/restore your data, and test your client applications. This will take time for the IT staff to do (and therefore money). This is what I meant by "devoting money".
Specifically, when I upgraded, I ran into these problems:
- A primary key broke and I had to fix it before going ultimately migrating to 8.2.
- The cidr data type is more strictly checked, I had to fix a couple rows before migrating.
- Permissions and ownership underwent slight changes.
- User and groups were conflated into roles, which necessitated a change in my user/group management scripts.
I tested these thoroughly before making the migration final. I found most of these problems from a simple dump/restore. If you can, dump and restore your databases to a test server (insofar as you can) and you should be able to fix most migration issues.
The last thing you'll want to do is test your more critical client applications. Postgres is very good about maintaining backwards compatibility of SQL, so most things should "just work." Still, test.
Peter