Re: pg_upgrade --jobs

are there any shortcuts to upgrading that would circumvent exporting the
entire schema?

By "shortcuts," do you mean you want to minimize the time and energy you
put into the upgrade, or that you want to minimize database downtime? If
you mean downtime, I was able to upgrade a customer-facing database with
~350,000 tables from Postgres 9.0 to 9.6 last year with only 86 seconds of
downtime, using Slony, but I had to make many custom modifications to Slony
and test thoroughly beforehand, and it was not for the faint of heart, the
pressed for time, or the inexperienced. There may be better ways (and if
so, I would be curious to learn about them), but Slony was the tool with
which I was most familiar at the time.

This method does, of course, require exporting the entire schema, but
because our only constraint was to minimize customer downtime, and the
database was online while the schema was being exported, we didn't care how
long it took. Your constraints may be different.

For those reading: we do know that 350,000 tables is Doing It Wrong, and
we're getting rid of them, but we decided being on an EOLed version of
Postgres was worse and should be fixed first.

Sherrylyn