Re: Copying data files to new hardware?

Yes, we've used Slony for migrating 8.2 -> 8.3 -> 8.4 and plan an using it to migrate to 9.0 in the near future. You should be able to skip releases as well like you say 8.2 -> 8.4.

You'll probably want to test out both slony and 8.4 on your development machines first and make sure everything works okay. It takes a little bit to get familiar with slony, it's not a simple program that you install and click a button to set up replication and have everything happen for you. We spent a fair amount of time writing scripts to work with slony to help support our processes.

On Oct 13, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Evan D. Hoffman wrote:

> Thanks, Brian & Jaime. Regarding Slony, would that allow for
> migration to a new version as well - i.e. moving from 8.2 on the old
> machine to 8.4 on the new machine via Slony with minimal downtime?
>
> The Slony method is one I hadn't considered. Since our database is so
> large, even a direct file copy would require some downtime (since we'd
> need to stop the DB before beginning the copy). Slony would probably
> let us cut the downtime from hours to minutes (dump & restore for us
> has historically taken days).
>
> Thanks again,
> Evan