Re: pg_upgrade and statistics

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 12:12:27AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> > Copying the statistics from the old server is on the pg_upgrade TODO
> > list. I have avoided it because it will add an additional requirement
> > that will make pg_upgrade more fragile in case of major version changes.
>
> > Does anyone have a sense of how often we change the statistics data
> > between major versions?
>
> I don't think pg_statistic is inherently any more stable than any other
> system catalog. We've whacked it around significantly just last week,
> which might color my perception a bit, but there are other changes on
> the to-do list. (For one example, see nearby complaints about
> estimating TOAST-related costs, which we could not fix without adding
> more stats data.)

Yes, that was my reaction too. pg_upgrade has worked hard to avoid
copying any system tables, relying on pg_dump to handle that.

I just received a sobering blog comment stating that pg_upgrade took 5
minutes on a 0.5TB database, but analyze took over an hour:

http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2012.html#March_12_2012

Is there some type of intermediate format we could use to dump/restore
the statistics? Is there an analyze "light" mode we could support that
would run faster?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +