Re: Possible bug on insert - Mailing list pgsql-general

Rick Gigger wrote:
> No offense taken.  I am very meticulous about any software upgrades that I
> do on my production systems.  I'm not quite sure what you mean by "this
> business since you have no idea what I am actually doing.  For all you know
> I am a boy scout developing a public service web site to earn a merit badge
> and am not actually in any business. ;-)  I suppose that I shouldn't have

Well.. Let's leave that part out to keep this discussion technical.:-)

> said that I don't want to have to test my apps to upgrade to a new version
> of postgres.  I am used to having to do this for any of the software on my
> servers.  What I should have said is that I would prefer not to have to go
> any change a bunch of code on my production applications immediately.  I
> realize that in order to make progress it is sometimes neccesary to break
> compatibility with old stuff.  That being said it would have been nice in my
> opinion if there was an option to revert to the old behavior for at least a
> while so that I can upgrade sooner rather than later.  It is not going to be
> a huge problem for me to update the apps but I am probably going to wait
> until I am already making other changes and going through a full testing
> cycle before I do the upgrade.  The whole proccess would just be a lot
> smoother if I had the option of using the old behavior with 7.3 for while.

Well.. I haven't work enough on pg to make a migration across versions. But the
app. I work on regularly is routinely one year behind a major oracle release and
we spend good deal of our time testing oracle bug/feature compatibility and
making any changes required.

I hope that answers your question.

It really depends upon how much mission critical your app. is. If its something
that monitors heart beats of patients in a 10000 patient hospital in a central
fashion (Just making it up) or controlling a nuke plant, I would rather test
everything I can.

>
> Plus if I have to tell people that we have to spend time and money retesting
> all of our apps just to not get stuck on an old version of the database
> that's one more thing they might bring up when making the case to switch to
> something else.  This is why I would like to know about other systems
> maintaining backwards compatibility.  If I had the option to use the old
> behavior it would be a lot easier to make the transition without anyone
> noticing.  Once again not an insurmountable obstacle but it would be nice.

Retesting with application with version upgrade in dependent components is fact
of life. It is a must. Its upto you to decide whether you can afford to bypass
it, fully or partially. Of course there are business constraints that decides
where the trade off settles.

If you are happy with the way pg upgrade, good for you. But you should read
release notes carefully and work on removing/changing any deprecated features in
time.

Usually pg makes a feature non-default in one major version and removes it
completely in next major version. So you have time of two major releases to take
care of any issues. I think that is more than what anybody else can give across
versions.

  Shridhar