Re: [HACKERS] PG_UPGRADE status?

> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> >Lamar Owen wrote:
> > > If I were a better C coder, and had more experience with the various
> > > versions' on-disk formats, I'd be happy to try to tackle it myself.
> > > But, I'm not that great of a C coder, nor do I know the data structures
> > > well enough. Oh well.
> >
> > You would have to convert tons of rows of data in raw format. Seems
> > like dump/reload would be easier.
>
> For normal situations, it is. However, in an RPM upgrade that occurs as
> part of an OS upgrade (say, from RedHat 6.0 to RedHat 6.1), NO daemons
> can be run during a package upgrade. That doesn't seem too bad until you
> realize just what an RPM upgrade does....

Wow, doing a database upgrade inside an automated RPM. That's quite a
task. From your description, running pg_dumpall and psql to load the
data is a real chore in an automated system.

Considering the changes in aligment of row elements, and index table
changes, it would be quite difficult to write a program to convert that
data from one format to another. Not impossible, but quite hard.

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