Re: Support platform of PostgresSQL 8.1.9 under IBM AIX 5.3

mvazqueb(at)mx1(dot)ibm(dot)com (Manuel G Vazquez B/Mexico/IBM) writes:
> <br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">I have a customer who bought an IBM
> Power Systems, running AIX 5.3 and wants to install the </font><font size=2 face="Arial">PostgresSQL
> 8.1.9. Can you pls tell me where I can Download this version for AIX? and
> if youa have some documentation or FAQs about the installation you can
> share?</font>

I am not aware that anyone has built RPMs for AIX or any such thing;
your customer will almost certainly need to compile from source, and,
as a result, may pull sources from one of the PostgresSQL "mirror"
sites:
<http://wwwmaster.postgresql.org/download/mirrors-ftp>

There is a FAQ on issues that specifically relate to AIX:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.FAQ_AIX.html

I would observe that version 8.1.9 is Rather Old, being released in
April 2007, and that there are some seven additional releases on the
8.1 branch. If the customer really wants to be tied to major version
8.1, they should *seriously* consider 8.1.16 instead, as there are 7
releases worth of bug fixes. They should definitely examine the
release notes to see what changes in 8.1.10 thru 8.1.16 are material
to them, or, simply use 8.1.16 instead of 8.1.9.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/release.html

It is further worth observing that there are a large number of
material changes between the 8.1 branch, which was first released in
2005, and the 8.3 branch, which is considered the latest "production"
branch.

I would not recommend pointing a customer to what is essentially a 4
year old version of PostgresSQL. That's rather like pointing someone
to Oracle 9, when version 11 is the "state of the art."

There are a lot more "edge cases" with PostgresSQL 8.1 on AIX than
with 8.3. In particular, getting readline (which provides the ability
to edit the psql command line) to compile into PostgresSQL 8.1 is
rather hairy on AIX; it is likely that the customer would not only
need to compile PostgresSQL from source, but also readline. By
PostgresSQL 8.3, the build process has changed enough that readline
support is no longer a challenge.
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