Re: How do you upgrade for production servers?

Realistically you should include some time for testing ... a few things may fail to work (not many -- the core is quite good about legacy issues, me thinks), but you may well run into some things that take longer to run that they used to. Explain Analyze is your faithful companion, as is the performance list. Better to spend an extra day or two than start getting phone calls and pages, IMHO. SO do a trial run, hopefully test it with real queries for speed, desired results and so on. (Generally we've found that newer versions do run faster but there are exceptions.)

Greg Williamson
DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org on behalf of Andy Shellam (Mailing Lists)
Sent: Fri 12/29/2006 4:42 AM
To: arnaulist(at)andromeiberica(dot)com; pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Cc:
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] How do you upgrade for production servers?

If upgrading between minor versions in the same series (e.g. 8.1.3 -
8.1.5) you can simply use the same data directory.

However, if the major version changes (e.g. 8.1.x - 8.2.x), you must:

1. Dump the databases from your old server (preferably using the new
version client, I believe) while your old server is still running
2. Stop your old version
3. Start your new version
4. Restore the backup into your new version

For the minimum downtime, the best thing to do is get the 2 servers
running together (e.g. run your new version on port 5433) - then dump
your old database, stop your old server (so no updates can get in after
your backup), restore the backup into the new server, and restart your
new server on port 5432. It all depends on how big your databases are,
and the length of time it'll take to restore your backup.

Happy New Year to you too.

Andy.

Arnau wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is a general question about which procedure you follow when you
> upgrade your productions servers. Let's say we have a server running
> and older version and I want to install the latest version on the same
> server. Do you install slony? do you dump all the databases, install
> the latest version and after you restore? any other procedure? I'd
> like to have my production server down as less time as possible.
>
>
> Thank you very much and have a great new year :D

--
Andy Shellam
NetServe Support Team

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