Scott Marlowe wrote:
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Chris Bovitz
<Christopher.Bovitz@noaa.gov> wrote:
  
We have 8.1.3 on our operational and development database servers and will
upgrade to 8.3.3 (development) and 8.2.9 (operations) soon.  (We will not
upgrade both systems' databases now because we've already tested 8.2 on our
web server database for the past year, so it's already spent time in
"development.")  I have read through the server upgrade notes, and they seem
to be pretty self-explanatory.  It's even mentioned how to upgrade the
client.  And that's where my questions lie.

The clients on our workstations were installed when our 8.1.3 was installed,
which I was not involved with.  When I do "psql --version" on a client
machine, it says "8.0.3".  When I do this on the server, I get "8.1.3".

Do we need to upgrade the clients?  Should we?  If so to which version?
 What is involved with that?  That is, other than the note in the
upgrade/installation man pages, is there a set of instructions for upgrading
the client-side software?  If we don't have to upgrade now, when would we
have to?  Are there any things to watch for I should be aware of?
    

>From the perspective of libpq it's not a huge deal, but psql needs to
match to make the \ commands work properly.  Upgrading the client is
pretty simple.  Remove the old client packages and install the new
ones.
  
Does it matter which version - 8.3.3 or 8.2.9 - we install on our client boxes?  Is the client-side backwards compatible?  Or should we install both and have a wrapper for the "psql" script to detect which database we're going to and use the appropriate binaries?


Chris