Re: Finally upgrading to 9.6!

On 19/10/17 10:34, Don Seiler wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Vik Fearing
> <vik(dot)fearing(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com <mailto:vik(dot)fearing(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>> wrote:
>
> On 10/18/2017 08:17 PM, Don Seiler wrote:
>
> > I disagree with this. It isn't my company's business to test the
> > Postgres software in development, as much as it would be needed and
> > appreciated by the community.
>
> Yeah, let others do it for you!  Great attitude.
>
>
> It's a realistic, practical attitude. I'm sorry that not every company
> wants to offer the resources to contribute back to the community as
> much as you want. But it's foolish to expect a company to perform
> their development lifecycle against betas and RCs. They have their own
> products to worry about. A gallant few may let their DBAs do some
> sandbox testing to contribute time back to the community, but you
> can't expect them to.
Actually that attitude is short sighted, as your company might trigger
problems no one else has (or at least not prepared to report bugs on). 
Surely you want such bugs fixed BEFORE you use pg in production???

It is also likely to take time to know how best to use the changes in a
newer version of pg for your database in your operational environment.

So it is in the best self interests of your company to to test
development versions of pg prior to final release.  Helping others, in
this context, is a more sophisticated form of selfishness than you
display at the moment.

Cheers,
Gavin

> > I'm planning a mass upgrade to 9.6 soon as well and the question
> was raised
> > as to whether or not to go right to 10.0, and I quickly put that
> down.
>
> Right, because when you say "official release versus a beta or release
> candidate", you don't actually mean it.
>
>
> I don't even know what you mean here. You're responding like I ran
> over your dog and it's quite ridiculous.
>
> Plain and simple, I wouldn't expect any DBA responsible for production
> databases to run on a new major release, regardless of
> platform/vendor. It's asking for a headache and maybe a few noisy
> pager nights. It doesn't matter how much faith I have in the Postgres
> contributors/developers, I have a responsibility to my employer to
> keep their database platforms up and running. That is first and
> foremost. I'm sure if I found myself with time to spare, I'll test
> upgrading a prod clone to 10 and asking some devs to run it through
> its paces, but spare time is a luxury that you can't just expect
> people to have.
>
> --
> Don Seiler
> www.seiler.us <http://www.seiler.us>