Re: Considering an upgrade...

Gary Horton wrote:
> I'm needing to convince my boss that we should upgrade from 7.3.4 to 8.x
> Postgresql. I've already enumerated the upsides, but now we need to
> consider the risks...I wonder if anyone can mention/summarize any
> issues, problems, gotchas, etc. that have happened in anyone's upgrade
> from 7.x to 8.x ... this would be greatly appreciated. For that matter,
> if there are any benefits people have seen in addition to what's
> mentioned on postgres website, this would be good info too.
We (the company I work for) has upgraded a rather large e-commerce
appplication
from pg 7.4 to 8.0. It took a few hours to fix some sql that wouldn't
work in 8.0,
but it was mostly buggy code that happened to work in 7.4 "by chance" (e.g,
triggers declared as "BEFORE" instead of "AFTER", and therefore reported
a foreignkey
violation in 8.0, but worked in 7.4, probably due to slight differences
in trigger execution order).

8.0 brought a big performance win, especially when running selects while
another process
is importing lots of data, and we didn't have a single crash with 8.0 so
far (We had a few data-file
corruptions with the first 7.4 releases).

On the whole, the update as quite easy ride, but I'd still recommend you
to test all aspects
of your software after the migration, since 8.0 isn't bug-for-bug
compatible with 7.4

> We are on a Solaris system (including customers with sol 8, 9, and 10),
> running 7.3.4. Thanks in advance ... and if you would, please cc me at
> my email address since I'm not subscribed to this alias.
Well, we are running on linux (32 and 64 bit x86), so I can't really
comment on
how things are on solaris.

greetings, Florian Pflug