Re: When to switch to Postgres 8.0?

On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 14:17:41 -0500,
jao(at)geophile(dot)com wrote:
> My company has a product in beta which uses Postgres 7.4.3. We expect
> to have a code freeze for our 1.0 product in March 2005. I'd really
> like to use Postgres 8.x in our 1.0 product. We're especially looking
> forward to the background writer and tablespaces.
>
> Is the 8.0 release date known?

No but it is likely to be released in December sometime based on current
progress. There will probably be another beta in about a week and there
has been talk of starting to do release candidates after that.

> Suppose 8.0 is released in December or January. Is it a sane thing
> to put 8.0 in a shipping product within the first two months of its
> release? I know that 8.0 is an enormous release, but I'm hoping some
> of the old-timers can extrapolate from previous major version
> upgrades.

Based on what I have seen, I think the risks of odd things happening with
this major release is greater than any since 7.1 (which is as far back
as I go). You need to consider which features in 8.0 you want that are
not in 7.4.6. You also need to consider how much testing you will be
able to do before the March code freeze. It is likely there will be
an 8.0.1 before March and if you find problems early enough and communicate
them back to the Postgres project early enough, there will probably be
fixes in an official release that you can use. You also have the options
to use your own patches if need be.

If you want to get a feel for how things have gone in the past, take a look
at the release notes for the minor releases and see what kinds of problems
have been fixed.