Re: Prototype: In-place upgrade v02

On Fri, 5 Sep 2008, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

> All in all, though. I find it a bit hard to see the big picture.

I've been working on trying to see that myself lately, have been dumping
links to all the interesting material at
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/In-place_upgrade if there's any of that
you haven't seen before.

> To keep this concrete, let's focus on PG 8.2 -> PG 8.3 (or are you
> focusing on PG 8.3 -> 8.4? That's fine with me as well, but let's pick
> one)

From a complexity perspective, the changes needed to go from 8.2->8.3 seem
much larger than what's needed for 8.3->8.4. There's also a huge PR win
if 8.4 goes out the door saying that in-place upgrades are available from
the previous version starting at the 8.4 release. Given the limited time
left, I would think a focus on nailing the 8.3->8.4 conversion down first
and then slipping in support for earlier revs later would be one way to
get this into more managable chunks. Obviously if you can fit
infrastructure that makes the 8.2 conversion easier that's worth doing,
but I'd hate to see this get bogged down worrying too much about things
that haven't actually changed since 8.3.

The specific areas I am getting up to speed to help out with here are
catalog updates and working on integration/testing.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD