Re: Commission clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Leif Biberg Kristensen wrote:
> There's one thing that PostgreSQL still is missing: Transparent upgrades,
> without the dump / upgrade / reload routine. That's just too awkward in a
> hosted environment.
>

There's no good solution for 8.2 or below, but pg_migrator does this
just fine for any simple case, starting with PostgreSQL 8.3:
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pg-migrator

It can be tricky to get the program installed and working properly if
you're not familiar with building software yourself from source. And
there are limitations related to advanced features like large objects,
or upgrades of user-defined types into 8.4. But those aren't things I'd
expect your typical install in a hosting environment to have used in the
first place.

Now, actually getting pg_migrator packaged up so that it's easy for
people in a hosted environment to use, that's an unsolved problem as far
as I know. But the idea that you need dump/upgrade/reload isn't really
true anymore, once you cross the line to running at least 8.3.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com