Re: [HACKERS] Lots 'o patches

> One of the Illustra customers moving to Informix UDO that I have had the
> pleasure of working with is Egghead software. They sell stuff over the web.
> 24 hours a day. Every day. Their database takes something like 20 hours to
> dump and reload. The last time they did that they were down the whole time
> and it made the headline spot on cnet news. Not good. I don't think they
> want to do it again.
>
> If we want postgresql to be usable by real businesses, requiring downtime is
> not acceptable.
>
> A proper upgrade would just update the catalogs online and fix any other
> issues without needing a dump / restore cycle.
>
> As a Sybase customer once told one of our support people in a very loud voice
> "THIS is NOT a "Name and Address" database. WE SELL STOCKS!".

That is going to be difficult to do. We used to have some SQL scripts
that could make the required database changes, but when system table
structure changes, I can't imagine how we would migrate that without a
dump/reload. I suppose we could keep the data/index files with user data,
run initdb, and move the data files back, but we need the system table
info reloaded into the new system tables.

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