Re: 8.3b1 in production?

"rihad" <rihad(at)mail(dot)ru> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Does anyone have an idea how risky it is to start using 8.3b1 in production,
> with the intention of upgrading to release (or newer beta) as soon as it
> becomes available? Risky compared to running a release, that is. Beta ->
> release upgrades might be less tricky than 8.2 -> 8.3.

Well nobody's going to be able to guess at what problems haven't been found
yet. All we can say decisively is what bugs have already been found:

. On Windows UTF8 encoding isn't allowed

. VACUUM does an unnecessarily large amount of I/O

. Toaster could cause failures on machines with strict alignment

. Resources limits in Windows limit the number of clients

. pg_tablespace_size() on pg_global fails even for superuser

. ABI break with old libpq for applications which depend on encoding IDs
(such as initdb -- you can't run initdb with an 8.2 libpq against an 8.3 server)

. invalid tsvector input could cause crashes

. ALTER COLUMN TYPE would reset the index's options, possibly moving it to the
default tablespace or worse

Also:

. A new data type, txid, was added

. Several new contrib modules were added to aid tsearch migration

. Some tsearch functions were removed or modified

. tsearch word categories were redefined and renamed

. Make plan invalidation work for dropped sequences (etc)

. Be careful to get share lock on each page before computing its free space.

. This avoids useless checkpoint activity if XLogWrite is executed when we
have a very stale local copy of RedoRecPtr.

. Teach planagg.c that partial indexes specifying WHERE foo IS NOT NULL can be
used to perform MIN(foo) or MAX(foo)

. Remove an Assert that's been obsoleted by recent changes in the parsetree
representation of DECLARE CURSOR. Report and fix by Heikki.

. Ensure that the result of evaluating a function during constant-expression
simplification gets detoasted before it is incorporated into a Const node.

. Make dumpcolors() have tolerable performance when using 32-bit chr, as we do

. Make "role is not permitted to log in" errors not be hidden

. Remove quotes around locale names in some places for consistency.

. Add missing entry for PG_WIN1250 encoding, per gripe from Pavel Stehule.
Also enable translation of PG_WIN874

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com