Re: How do you upgrade for production servers?

Arnau <arnaulist(at)andromeiberica(dot)com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> This is a general question about which procedure you follow when
> you upgrade your productions servers. Let's say we have a server
> running and older version and I want to install the latest version
> on the same server. Do you install slony? do you dump all the
> databases, install the latest version and after you restore? any
> other procedure? I'd like to have my production server down as less
> time as possible.

From personal experience, the Slony aided upgrade between Postgres
major versions results in the least downtime.

The negatives are that if you've never worked with Slony before,
getting familiar with it and then R&D needed to make sure your upgrade
goes smoothly can be very time costly.

You also have to be comfortable with the substantial complexity that
Slony adds to the DB while in use.

Still if you have DBs that would take hours or days to load from dump
files, and business can't allow a service window for doing this, Slony
is the way.

I have a vague notion that someone was working on a contrib (maybe
unofficial) package for fast upgrade but you'll have to investigate.

HTH

> Thank you very much and have a great new year :D
> --
> Arnau
>
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Jerry Sievers 305 854-3001 (home) Production Database Administrator
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