Re: Upgrading databases

Mark Richardson wrote:
> Sorry if this is in the wrong list, but this is the closest I could find...
>
> I have a 8.2.4 database and I installed 8.3.7 and tried using the same
> /pgsql/data/base directory and got an error about incompatiblity.
>
> The database currently has billions of records but it's sparsely populated.
> It took about 4 months to just populate the original database and I REALLY
> don't want to do that again.
>
> Is there a conversion routine to change the files themselves? I know I can
> dump and reload - but that takes large disk space and time. Any other way
> around?

There is no 'in-situ' DB upgrade between major updates from what I can
tell. There is, however, an alternative to the 'dump to disk' approach
which is to pipe the dump from the old DB to the new DB as outlined in
the migration guide here:
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/migration.html>

HTH.

Bosc.