Re: Re: [Pkg-postgresql-public] Postgres major version support policy on Debian

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 2:23 AM, Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda(at)deb(dot)at> wrote:
> * Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> [2008-10-06 18:07:39 CEST]:
>> On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Markus Wanner <markus(at)bluegap(dot)ch> wrote:
>> > Well, it's a general Postgres problem, not a Debian one. Upgrading
>> > between major versions requires a full dump/restore cycle, for which the
>> > downtime is proportional to the database size. For small or medium
>> > databases that's not an issue, but above some Gigabytes, that begins to
>> > hurt pretty badly.
>>
>> In that case I prefer to have both db versions available and use slony
>> to upgrade in place. We recently upgraded from 8.1 to 8.3 and work
>> the downtime was measured in seconds (the time it took slony to switch
>> the two servers).
>
> Good to hear. Though I see another problem here, slony is always only
> available for a single postgres version in the current packaging, so
> that upgrading path isn't that easy as you make it sound... At least not
> if you want to do it on a single system and not through two different
> machines.

This is certainly not true for slony on ubuntu. On Ubuntu there's a
slony1-bin package that has the common files, and then there's
postgresql-8.x-slony1 package for each pgsql version that has the
scripts to make that version happy.