Re: reindexing

Lew wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> There never was a 7.1.4 release, so I suspect the OP meant 7.4.1
>> .... not that that speaks very much better for his software maintenance
>> habits. Even with the more charitable interpretation, it's a version
>> that was obsoleted four years ago next week.
>
> In my experience at various "big-iron" shops (government agencies,
> large health-care organizations and the like), four years is not a
> long time for enterprise software - a version often has to be at least
> four years old before the powers-that-be decide to try it. One has
> only to look at how many organizations still use Oracle 8, or Java
> 1.3, for example, to see how conservative many shops are with respect
> to upgrades.
>
> I'm not saying they should be that conservative, but many
> organizations are and we must be ready to deal with that.
>

This is completely the opposite of my experience at a very large global
financial company. They are extremely concerned with staying current,
and in fact audit regulations require it for any software not written
in-house. If they were still running Oracle 8, for example, they would
fail internal audit precisely because it is no longer a supported Oracle
version, and thus security and such patches are no longer available.
The same would go for operating system patches, firmware, whatever. The
release cycle does tend to be slower (from quarterly to yearly) for,
say, things like AIX or z/OS or DB2, but updates are coming out
routinely [including security and bug fixes, as well as feature
additions], and in my experience these shops are definitely keeping up.

The only places I've had direct experience with that tend to run very
old versions of things are doing so for all the wrong reasons. They
seem to be learning, albeit slowly and painfully, the demerits of not
keeping current.

Just my $0.02,
Paul