I am trying to upgrade my database from 8.0 to 8.1 and am looking for a little info/advice.
This is a production database that we are migrating and it is in CONSTANT use, so the maintenance window must be small and hopefully mostly off-hours.
We use a PITR/LVM snapshot solution for our backups and were hoping to simply restore the filesystem and startup under 8.1. Obviously this didnt work, and I know the doc says a conversion is necessary, however I havent found anything with enough detail to sway me from a better solution than pg_restore.
The problem with pg_restore is that our database takes 3+ weeks to restore from a dump file. This is not an acceptable window for us. ( Approximately 3 days of this is data + lobs, and the rest indexes and constraints. If we are doing something wrong here, I am all ears as well )
Could anyone point me to the information I am missing or offer some middle ground solutions?
