Re: (A) native Windows port

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 17:28, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Hannu Krosing wrote:
> > > Our very extensibility is our weakness for upgrades. Can it be worked around?
> > > Anyone have any ideas?
> >
> > Perhaps we can keep an old postgres binary + old backend around and then
> > use it in single-user mode to do a pg_dump into our running backend.
>
> That brings up an interesting idea. Right now we dump the entire
> database out to a file, delete the old database, and load in the file.
>
> What if we could move over one table at a time? Copy out the table,
> load it into the new database, then delete the old table and move on to
> the next. That would allow use to upgrade having free space for just
> the largest table. Another idea would be to record and remove all
> indexes in the old database. That certainly would save disk space
> during the upgrade.
>
> However, the limiting factor is that we don't have a mechanism to have
> both databases running at the same time currently.

How so ?

AFAIK I can run as many backends as I like (up to some practical limit)
on the same comuter at the same time, as long as they use different
ports and different data directories.

> Seems this may be
> the direction to head in.
>
> > BTW, how hard would it be to move pg_dump inside the backend (perhaps
> > using a dynamically loaded function to save space when not used) so that
> > it could be used like COPY ?
> >
> > pg> DUMP table [ WITH 'other cmdline options' ] TO stdout ;
> >
> > pg> DUMP * [ WITH 'other cmdline options' ] TO stdout ;
>
> Intersting idea, but I am not sure what that buys us. Having pg_dump
> separate makes maintenance easier.

can pg_dump connect to single-user-mode backend ?

--------------------
Hannu