Re: Is Diskeeper Automatic Mode safe?

On Nov 16, 2009, at 8:31 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Make sure you're not in the line of fire when (not if) that version
> eats your data. Particularly on Windows, insisting on not upgrading
> that version is unbelievably, irresponsibly stupid. There are a
> *large* number of known bugs.

I hear ya, and have agreed with you for a long while. There is a
fairly regular and constant fight in house over the issue of
upgrading. We get hit on a regular basis with problems that as far as
I know are bugs that have been fixed (transaction log rename crashes
that take down PG, as well as queries just vanishing into the aether
at times of heavy load resulting in hung threads in our Tomcat front
end as it waits for something to come back that has disappeared).

On Nov 16, 2009, at 9:45 PM, Greg Smith wrote:

> Yeah, the prudent thing to do in your situation is to issue a CYA
> memo that says something like "I think the hardware is OK, but due
> to large number of bugs in PostgreSQL 8.0.4 on Windows it's easy for
> the database to become corrupted anyway", point toward http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/release.html
> to support that claim and note that 8.0.22 is the absolutely
> minimum version anyone should be running, then CC everyone up the
> management chain. You're using a version that considers your data
> quite tasty and would like to make a snack of it at the first
> opportunity that arises.

Myself and the other guy responsible for the underlying hardware have
already gone down this route. The big bosses know our stance and know
it isn't us preventing the upgrade. After that, there isn't too much
more I can do except sit back and shake my head each time something
goes wrong and I get sent on a wild goose chase to find any reason for
the failure OTHER than PG.

Really it comes down to the DBMs have a firm stance of nothing
changes, ever. Me, I say bug fixes are released for a reason.

My understanding is, before I joined the company, they did an upgrade
from 7 on Linux to 8 on Windows and got bit by some change in PG that
broke a bunch of code. After that, they have just refused to budge
from the 8.0.4 version we are on and know the code works against. I
don't really have any details beyond that and asking for them tends to
invoke religious wars in house between the Linux/Open Source people
and the Windows/Buy Everything people. So I've given up fighting,
covered my butt, and just do the best I can to keep things running.

Thanks again for the insights!

-chris
<www.mythtech.net>