Thanks, that's a nice peek inside the sausage factory. Obviously it would be real nice if pg_upgrade could work it's voodoo on the standby without having to rsync everything. Seems like most agree there so I'll leave it at that.
In the meantime I'll look at using the --link method and rsync. Probably should be using --link method on a larger database anyway to save time and disk space?
Don.
On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
Don, * Don Seiler (don@seiler.us) wrote: > Planning steps to upgrade our 9.2 DB to the latest stable 9.6 using > pg_upgrade. I've gone through the steps for a primary/standalone DB and > they work well. Looking into how then to upgrade the standby, the > documentation says that *the data_dir from the master should be rsync'ed to > each slave*. > > Is this truly the case? Having to copy all the data from the primary will > be a huge issue for our larger databases. I had hoped we'd just need to > upgrade the binaries, copy the old data dir to the new data dir, update > conf files as needed and turn it back on (similar to Oracle standby > upgrade).
There is a method to avoid having to copy the data from the primary, but it requires using --link mode with pg_upgrade and it's a bit of an involved process that requires very carefully following the steps and doing additional validation.
A discussion around exactly this is currenlty ongoing as to how we can improve the documentation on this method. You can find that discussion here: