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

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 17:48, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > The initdb is not always a bad thing. In reality the idea of just
> > being able to "upgrade" is not a good thing. Just think about the
> > differences between 7.2.3 and 7.3.x... The most annoying (although
> > appropriate) one being that integers can no longer be ''.
>
> But that's just not going to cut it if PostgreSQL wants to be
> a serious "player" in the enterprise space, where 24x7 systems
> are common, and you just don't *get* 12/18/24/whatever hours to
> dump/restore a 200GB database.
>
> For example, there are some rather large companies whose fac-
> tories are run 24x365 on rather old versions of VAX/VMS and
> Rdb/VMS, because the DBAs can't even get the 3 hours to do
> in-place upgrades to Rdb, much less the time the SysAdmin needs
> to upgrade VAX/VMS to VAX/OpenVMS.
>
> In our case, we have systems that have multiple 300+GB databases
> (working in concert as one big system), and dumping all of them,
> then restoring (which includes creating indexes on tables with
> row-counts in the low 9 digits, and one which has gone as high
> as 2+ billion records) is just totally out of the question.

'k, but is it out of the question to pick up a duplicate server, and use
something like eRServer to replicate the databases between the two
systems, with the new system having the upgraded database version running
on it, and then cutting over once its all in sync?