Re: upgrade requires dump/restore?

On 10 Feb 2003, Stephane Charette wrote:

> "The PostgreSQL team makes only small changes between minor releases,
> so upgrading from 7.2 to 7.2.1 does not require a dump and restore.

This says that you don't need to dump/restore when you are just upgrading
7.2 => 7.2.4, or 7.3.1 => 7.3.2. Minor releases contain mainly bug
fixes.

> However, major releases (e.g. from 7.2 to 7.3) often change the internal
> format of system tables and data files."

This sentence says that "Often new major versions have incompatible
on-disk formats and thus most of major versions WILL ALWAYS require
dump/restore when upgrading". The reason why there's often is that there
MAY be some future releases that don't need dump/restore, not that it
could be made optional in some cases.

For example you need always dump/restore when upgrading from 7.2.x to
7.3.y.

And of course you shouldn't use 7.2.3 anymore. Instead you should update
directly to 7.2.4.

--
Antti Haapala