I am currently running PG 8.1.4 windows.
The system is for a real time monitoring application (so downtime needs to be minimized if at all possible).
I will be migratng to a new server running PG 8.1.4 on FreeBSD 6.1.
I have been playing with various options for migrating the data. The database is currently about 8.5 GB.
pg_dump took about 90 minutes.
pg_restore has been running for over an hour and is abou 4% done (based on row counts on the tables).
I used the pg_dump option to insert records (as oposed to use the copy command - I don't know which would be faster for the restore).
In any case, I was thinking about performing a file system backup.
My concern is that I am movinf between different OS's (although both are i386 architecture). I will probably try it tomorrow to see if it works, but was just wondering if there are any caveats which I should be aware of.
I hope this works, since for my scenario, this will have the least downtime.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Regards,
Benjamin
PS. For those who have asked about performance, Windows is much slower than FreeBSD.
Machine specs are as follows:
Windows 2003 server, HP DL360, SCSI RAID-1, 2GB RAM, 2.8GHz XEON HT
FreeBSD 6.1, SuperMicro 5014C-T, SATA RAID-1, 1GB RAM, P4 3GHz
My stored procedure call went from 47ms avg to 6 ms average execution time on server, as reported by turning logging on
All queries in general appeared to run between 5x to 10x faster.