Re: Easy upgrade on Cpanel *without* downtime

On 8/26/08, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Slony replication lets postgresql accomplish this, which is really
> quite impressive. We just upgraded from an 8.1 server to an 8.3
> server via slony, and it went smooth as silk. db downtime was
> measured in seconds.

Thanks for this Scott. Sounds promising. But where can I find the
instructions to install Slony, then install new PG 8.3.3, then start
it with similar CONF settings and stuff, then setup the master and
slave (which I am not familiar with), and then switch master and slave
when everything is working?

To others who keep telling us that "PG is complex and if you want it
to be less so then contribute" -- well, sorry I am not that technical.
If the intended target audience of PG is only super-techsavvy folk who
can write C++ patches for every little functionality they need, then
perhaps I chose the wrong DB? I doubt it.

It would be really nice if the PG official community can have some
simple instructions to make a seamless upgrade, if no simpler patches
exist. At the very least the instructions will help us plentiful folk
who do NOT use PG in the exalted "enterprise" setting, but to run busy
websites. This is how MySQL became big too, by being convenient and
reliable (until recently anyway), but I see no point in that
discussion.

Anyhow, it would be really nice to have simple instructions. Searching
on Google for words like "Slony Postgresql upgrade" or "install slony
with postgresql 8.3" returns stuff that makes a lot of presumptions!

I have a CentOS 4 with Cpanel/WHM running. PG is in the usual place:

> whereis pgsql
pgsql: /usr/lib/pgsql /usr/include/pgsql /usr/share/pgsq

Now how can I install Slony so that it install PGSQL and allows me to
continue working with Apache/PHP for my website? I am reading this --
http://slony.info/documentation/installation.html -- but while it
textually mentions the stuff in the writeup, I don't see full
instructions to install Slony, then new PGSQL, then switching, and so
on.

So many thanks for any help anyone can provide! Or point me to some
resource that exists but is hiding from Google.