Thread: Upgrading from 7.2.3 to....??
Hi, I was planning a major upgrade on our PostgreSQL system, which is currently running PG 7.2.3 (on a Linux system) to 7.3.4. I see that version 7.4 just came out, with extremely interesting and nice features! (kudos to PostgreSQL's development team, BTW). But of course, there's so much that it's new that I find it kind of scary to upgrade straight to 7.4 (even though the testing period was longer). Since our upgrade will most likely take place early in January, maybe by then we'll have a better idea about how 7.4 performs in the real world, concerning stability/ reliability? What would be your advice? Is 7.3.4 the recommended one if we need reliability? Or has 7.4 earned sufficient trust by now? Also, how about back compatibility? Should I expect some trouble? I remember with one of the previous upgrades (I think it was from 7.1.* to 7.2.*), one of our SQL statements stopped working, and it did it pretty silently (i.e., the effect of the error would only be noticed under certain conditions). After a while, we noticed the error, and it was trivial to fix, but now it worries me now whenever I have to upgrade to a new second-digit in the version. Thanks for any comments, Carlos --
On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 14:56:26 -0500, Carlos Moreno <moreno@mochima.com> wrote: > > Since our upgrade will most likely take place early in > January, maybe by then we'll have a better idea about > how 7.4 performs in the real world, concerning stability/ > reliability? > > What would be your advice? Is 7.3.4 the recommended one > if we need reliability? Or has 7.4 earned sufficient > trust by now? You should go right to some version of 7.4. 7.4.1 should be out soon. 7.4 has a number of performance and maintainability features that you don't want to miss. Going to 7.3 will be ablut as hard as going to 7.4, so you might as well get the extra benefit. > Also, how about back compatibility? Should I expect some > trouble? I remember with one of the previous upgrades > (I think it was from 7.1.* to 7.2.*), one of our SQL > statements stopped working, and it did it pretty silently > (i.e., the effect of the error would only be noticed under > certain conditions). After a while, we noticed the error, > and it was trivial to fix, but now it worries me now > whenever I have to upgrade to a new second-digit in the > version. Schemas are new in 7.3 and that might cause you to worry about them. You can read through the release notes for 7.3 and 7.4 to look for changes that might cause you problems.
>>>>> "CM" == Carlos Moreno <moreno@mochima.com> writes: CM> What would be your advice? Is 7.3.4 the recommended one CM> if we need reliability? Or has 7.4 earned sufficient CM> trust by now? CM> Also, how about back compatibility? Should I expect some CM> trouble? I remember with one of the previous upgrades I just did that switch from 7.2 over to 7.4 this past weekend. It went very smoothly. The major things to watch for that I found in the history/release notes which were not very obvious were: 1) implicit converstion of empty string to numeric 0 is no longer there. be sure you either specify numeric 0 or string '0' when you mean that. 2) if you have default 'NOW()' (in quotes!) you have to change that to default NOW() without quotes. Similar for other date/time default thingies. 3) 7.2 used to nicely order your group by's implicitly. this is no longer the case -- you must explicitly list any ordering you wish imposed on group by's. I think that was it. The speed seems to be faster, but that could also be due to moving from a 4-disk RAID10 to a 14 disk RAID5 with faster spindles ;-) This is running my production site which does a *lot* of inserts/updates daily. I'm very happy with it. You will be to :-) -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Vivek Khera, Ph.D. Khera Communications, Inc. Internet: khera@kciLink.com Rockville, MD +1-240-453-8497 AIM: vivekkhera Y!: vivek_khera http://www.khera.org/~vivek/
On Dec 3, 2003, at 1:05 PM, Vivek Khera wrote:
>>>>>> "CM" == Carlos Moreno <moreno@mochima.com> writes:
>
> CM> What would be your advice? Is 7.3.4 the recommended one
> CM> if we need reliability? Or has 7.4 earned sufficient
> CM> trust by now?
>
> CM> Also, how about back compatibility? Should I expect some
> CM> trouble? I remember with one of the previous upgrades
>
> I just did that switch from 7.2 over to 7.4 this past weekend. It
> went very smoothly. The major things to watch for that I found in the
> history/release notes which were not very obvious were:
>
...
The one thing that I've run across in that upgrade path is with
triggers. If you use:
Create or replace function trigger_foo()
returns opaque
...
It's going to change the function to return a trigger.
If you subsequently use the create or replace syntax and don't change
the return type to trigger (because you haven't updated your code), the
back end will refuse to replace the function complaining of a mismatch
in return types.
eric