Re: Selling an 8.1 to 8.3 upgrade

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:03:06 -0600
Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Josh Trutwin
> <josh(at)trutwins(dot)homeip(dot)net> wrote:
> > I've been asked to put together a list of reasons to upgrade a db
> > from 8.1 to 8.3 and I've looked over the changelog, but they
> > want a bullet list of 4-5 top things.  I'm curious what others
> > would say the most 5 important updates from 8.1 to 8.3 are.
>
> There were a lot of improvements from 8.1 to 8.3. For the system
> at work, the compelling ones were:
> HOT updates.
> General improvements in the query planner. This has been true for
> nearly every new major release.
> Improved vacuuming, including multi-threaded vacuum capability.
> Concurrent index creation.
> Improved handling of joins
> Fillfactor setting
> Much improved checkpointing
> Changes to the buffering methods so large seq scans don't evict
> more popular data from the buffers. This is much more important
> than it sounds.

For me the reason to switch was the inclusion of the great work by
Oleg and Teodor: Full-text search into core.

It looks like 8.4 is going to be a great release too and I think it
will be an enough cool reason to switch not only DB release but OS
release as soon as 8.4 end up in the backport of Lenny.

--
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it