ok, the company (www.mpsllc.com) is now completely on postgres with
primarily access97 front-end (we are working on some perl/cgi scripts to
interact w/ the database over an intranet also) -- 20 users. i have
reported hanging up problems to this group, but those haven't recurred
since we took declare/fetch off of most user's odbc driver. i still have a
problem when the controller runs some financial reports on fridays, but we
are overcoming that simply with timing (we are still small enough for the
controller to yell at everyone to log out for a minute so he can run his
reports. . . -- not optimum, but stable -- optimum can come after
stability!).
now i need to be sure i have some regular maintenance in place --
specifically a regular vacuum and nightly (or more frequent) backup. maybe
someone could help me with the following questions?
1) we have a second hd in the system that can be used as a backup device,
in addition to a tape. i had planned to simply copy the directory via a
tar command run through cron. is that the best way, or should i consider a
pg_dump (which i know nearly nothing about)? also, i'd like to make a
backup during the day. what happens when the backup (tar or cp or pg_dump)
encounters a file in use? does it back it up, or skip it?
2) how do i schedule a regular vacuum through cron? do you not have to be
in psql to do a vacuum? or can you do it from the bash prompt? (we are
using linux rh 5.2, kernel 2.2.2, postgres 6.4.2)
thanks in advance! jt kirkpatrick / mps
