Re: Selling an 8.1 to 8.3 upgrade

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.

The differences add up to being huge for us. Our database servers are
quite beefy, but they'd be working a LOT harder under 8.1 than they do
under 8.3