Re: Yum upgrade of PostgreSQL 8.4 from to rc1 rendered dataunusable

I think the problem is mainly with the package manager.

We cannot ask the administrator to be "up to date" of the issues when
upgrading. For small companies where the sysadmin is the same that de
dbadmin, there should not be problem. But in large IT departments
sysadmins have their own problems and if you don't plan a careful
communication procedure between database and general administration
groups, this kind of problem will appear soon or later...

With the package it could be easy to show a warning, like apt-get and
dpkg do. For example, when upgrading in debian from 8.1 to 8.3, dpkg
first install 8.3 in another location, and second shows you a warning
about the problems you could find during upgrade. I don't know if yum
and rpm can show this type of messages...
Perhaps the problem is more with the package system (rpm and yum) that
the administrator... Anyway, it's just my opinion and there are opinions
for everybody.

And, of course, database admin should be aware of the problems that
could surge after upgrading. So, no upgrade should be taken without
knowing what is going to be updated. But this is an internal problem
between the sysadmin and the dbadmin. :-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Grittner <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>
To: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org, Jakov Sosic <jakov(dot)sosic(at)srce(dot)hr>
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Yum upgrade of PostgreSQL 8.4 from to rc1 rendered
dataunusable
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:58:11 -0500

Jakov Sosic <jakov(dot)sosic(at)srce(dot)hr> wrote:

> Great thing about package managers is that they resolve all your
> dependencies, that they provide working binaries, that they install
> much faster, that they are searched for in consistent way, etc etc.

I find that when we upgrade to a new major release of PostgreSQL, we
almost always need to have both the old and new major releases
installed at the same time. That overlap may only need to exist for a
few hours, or it may need to persist for months. Any installation
solution which doesn't support that pattern can't be used by many.
You might want to consider some way to support that.

-Kevin