Re: Musings

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?"

There may well be possible improvements to the PostgreSQL upgrade
process; "zero-downtime, zero-extra space upgrades" do not seem likely
to be amongst those things.

The last time I did an SAP upgrade, there were _five days_ of
down-time. Not 15 minutes, not "none," but rather a figure rather close
to a week.

For the IT guys to have sour grapes over upgrades requiring some time
and disk space is unsurprising; for them to pretend it is only a problem
with PostgreSQL is just dishonest.
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