Re: Upgrade master/slave: rsync?

Don,

* Don Seiler (don(at)seiler(dot)us) wrote:
> Planning steps to upgrade our 9.2 DB to the latest stable 9.6 using
> pg_upgrade. I've gone through the steps for a primary/standalone DB and
> they work well. Looking into how then to upgrade the standby, the
> documentation says that *the data_dir from the master should be rsync'ed to
> each slave*.
>
> Is this truly the case? Having to copy all the data from the primary will
> be a huge issue for our larger databases. I had hoped we'd just need to
> upgrade the binaries, copy the old data dir to the new data dir, update
> conf files as needed and turn it back on (similar to Oracle standby
> upgrade).

There is a method to avoid having to copy the data from the primary, but
it requires using --link mode with pg_upgrade and it's a bit of an
involved process that requires very carefully following the steps and
doing additional validation.

A discussion around exactly this is currenlty ongoing as to how we can
improve the documentation on this method. You can find that discussion
here:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/VisenaEmail(dot)10(dot)2b4049e43870bd16(dot)15d898d696f%40tc7-visena#VisenaEmail(dot)10(dot)2b4049e43870bd16(dot)15d898d696f(at)tc7-visena

Thanks!

Stephen