Re: To recover data corrupted

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com ("Jim C. Nasby") belched out:
> On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 01:03:16PM +0200, Frederic Massot wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> We have an old waiter Postgresql 6.5.3 which regularly had problem and
>> which crashed.
>
> 6.5?! Holy cow, you win the prize for oldest version I've seen.
>
> I don't know if even Tom Lane has experience with that old a version, so
> you're probably out of luck on recovering anything you don't have
> already.
>
> You very seriously need to upgrade. There's litterally dozens of data
> loss bugs that have been fixed since that time. I'd suggest trying to
> run the most recent 7.4.x version of pg_dump against the old database;
> if that works, load it into 7.4.x and then you can upgrade from there to
> 8.1.4 (out this week or next). You can try going directly to 8.1.3/4,
> but I suspect the newer pg_dump will have issues. You might actually
> have to go from 6.5 to an early 7.x release, and then up to 8.1 (8.1's
> pg_dump would probably work back to 7.2 if not 7.1 or 7.0).

There are fundamental changes to data types between 6.5 and 7.0; when
we did some "mass conversions" of 6.5-based databases to 7.4, a couple
of years ago, it turned out to be necessary to go as far as remapping
names of types, as date types have *massively* changed since then.

It wasn't "awfully hard" to do the conversions, but we couldn't depend
on pg_dump to do everything :-(.
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