Re: need for in-place upgrades (was Re: State of Beta 2)

On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 11:21, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
>
> > So instead of 1TB of 15K fiber channel disks (and the requisite
> > controllers, shelves, RAID overhead, etc), we'd need *two* TB of 15K
> > fiber channel disks (and the requisite controllers, shelves, RAID
> > overhead, etc) just for the 1 time per year when we'd upgrade
> > PostgreSQL?
>
> Ah, see, the post that I was responding to dealt with 300GB of data,
> which, a disk array for, is relatively cheap ... :)
>
> But even with 1TB of data, do you note have a redundant system? If you
> can't afford 3 hours to dump/reload, can you actually afford any better
> the cost of the server itself going poof?

We've survived all h/w issues so far w/ minimal downtime, running
in degraded mode (i.e., having to yank out a CPU or RAM board) until
HP could come out and install a new one. We also have dual-redun-
dant disk and storage controllers, even though it's been a good
long time since I've seen one of them die.

And I strongly dispute the notion that it would only take 3 hours
to dump/restore a TB of data. This seems to point to a downside
of MVCC: this inability to to "page-level" database backups, which
allow for "rapid" restores, since all of the index structures are
part of the backup, and don't have to be created, in serial, as part
of the pg_restore.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net
Jefferson, LA USA

"...always eager to extend a friendly claw"