Re: db dump

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 09:38 -0800, Kristin Tufte wrote:
> My question is - does anyone know a reason I shouldn't do the dump while
> the database is up and running or see any gotchas I should watch out
> for? Current postgres version is 7.4.13 (yes, yes, I know), the new
> version will probably be 8.2

Make sure to dump using the newer version of pg_dump, in your case 8.2.

If you are using an encoding other than SQL_ASCII with locale C, you
need to make sure that the data is actually encoded correctly. In 8.1
and before, postgresql was fairly lax about encoding, and you could
input byte sequences that are invalid for the encoding that you're
using. 8.2 makes that more strict, and 8.3 yet more strict.

Also, test with some subset of the data beforehand. 8.2's pg_dump should
work fine on 7.4, but I have personally not made that big of a version
jump with a significant amount of data.

And read the migration notes for each release in between. They can be
found in the release notes.

It's not bad if the source server is running -- in fact pg_dump depends
on it.

Regards,
Jeff Davis