Re: need for in-place upgrades

On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 06:37, Christopher Browne wrote:
> ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net (Ron Johnson) wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 16:29, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> >> On Sat, Sep 13, 2003 at 10:52:45AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >>
> >> > So instead of 1TB of 15K fiber channel disks (and the requisite
> >> > controllers, shelves, RAID overhead, etc), we'd need *two* TB of
> >> > 15K fiber channel disks (and the requisite controllers, shelves,
> >> > RAID overhead, etc) just for the 1 time per year when we'd upgrade
> >> > PostgreSQL?
> >>
> >> Nope. You also need it for the time when your vendor sells
> >> controllers or chips or whatever with known flaws, and you end up
> >> having hardware that falls over 8 or 9 times in a row.
> >
> > ????
>
> This of course never happens in real life; expensive hardware is
> _always_ UTTERLY reliable.
>
> And the hardware vendors all have the same high standards as, well,
> certain database vendors we might think of.
>
> After all, Oracle and MySQL AB would surely never mislead their
> customers about the merits of their database products any more than
> HP, Sun, or IBM would about the possibility of their hardware having
> tiny flaws.

Well, I use Rdb, so I wouldn't know about that!

(But then, it's an Oracle product, and runs on HPaq h/w...)

> And I would /never/ claim to have lost sleep as a result of flakey
> hardware. Particularly not when it's a HA fibrechannel array. I'm
> /sure/ that has never happened to anyone. [The irony herre should be
> causing people to say "ow!"]

Sure, I've seen expensive h/e flake out. It was the "8 or 9 times
in a row" that confused me.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net
Jefferson, LA USA

The difference between drunken sailors and Congressmen is that
drunken sailors spend their own money.