On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
Greetings, * Thorsten Schöning (tschoening@am-soft.de) wrote: > Guten Tag Keith, > am Donnerstag, 23. Februar 2017 um 18:57 schrieben Sie: > > > You can go directly from 8.3 to 9.5. Just be sure and use the > > pg_dump from 9.5 to generate the dump file from 8.3. > > Is there a specific reason for that? My current approach for upgrades > was dumping the old database using the old pg_dump, uninstalling the > old Postgres, installing the new one and restore from the old dump.
Yes. Using the older pg_dump may result in dumps that can't be restored into the newer version of PG because things like keywords have been added and must now be quoted. There are possibly other things that have been changed between the old version and the new one which would also require the new pg_dump to be used, but keywords are the big one.
The proper solution to the keyword/identifier quoting problem is to use "--quote-all-identifiers".