Upgrade issue (again).

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I am loathe to even bring this up, but with two messages today about it, I am
going to be short and sweet:

We don't have a reasonable upgrade path. ASCII dump->install
new->initdb->restore is not a reasonable upgrade. It is confusing to the
newbie, and should be fixed. We used to have an upgrade path in pg_upgrade
- -- but it no longer works (but it was most definitely a fine effort for its
time, Bruce!). Furthermore, the dump/restore cycle is a pain in the neck when
tables get larger than a few hundred megabytes. It's worse when the newer
version won't properly restore from the old dump -- and you have to edit,
potentially by hand, a multi-gigabyte dump to get it to restore.

A seamless binary upgrade utility will require Deep Knowledge -- of the kind
that very few pgsql-hackers have. Deeper knowledge than I have, that's for
sure -- or I would have already done it.

I am not going to beat it into the ground this time -- I have argued the
issue at length before (some would say for far too long! :-)). But I am
going to drop reminders as we get bug reports and compliants. And Iwould
remind the group that MySQL does this easily -- it has utilities to migrate
between its different table types.
- --
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11
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