Re: Musings

On Sun, 5 May 2002 cbbrowne(at)cbbrowne(dot)com wrote:

> On Sun, 05 May 2002 10:01:57 EDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
> mlw <markw(at)mohawksoft(dot)com> said:
> > It is sunday morning and I have been musing about some PostgreSQL issues. As
> > some of you are aware, my dot com, dot died, and I am working on a business
> > plan for a consulting company which, amongst other things, will feature
> > PostgreSQL. As I am working on the various aspects, some issue pop up about
> > PostgreSQL.
> >
> > Please don't take any of these personally, they are only my observations, if
> > you say they are non issues I would rather just accept that we disagree than
> > get into a nasty fight. They *are* issues to a corporate acceptance, I have
> > been challenged by IT people about them.
> >
> > (1) Major version upgrade. This is a hard one, having to dump out and
> > restore a database to go from 7.1 to 7.2 or 7.2 to 7.3 is really a
> > hard sell. If a customer has a very large database, this represents a
> > large amount of down-time. If they are running on an operating system
> > with file-size limitations it is not an easy task. It also means that
> > they have to have additional storage which amount to at least a copy
> > of the whole database.
>
> All of these things are true, and what you should throw back at the IT
> people is the question:
>
> "So what do you do when you upgrade from Oracle 7 to Oracle 8? How
> about the process of doing major Informix upgrades? Sybase? Does it
> not involve some appreciable amounts of down-time?"

This is most definately the wrong way of thinking about this. I'm not
saying that Mark sets a simple task, but the goals of Postgres should
never be limited to the other products out there.

Gavin