On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Russell Smith wrote:

Scott Marlowe wrote:
I too wait a day or two to test it on a staging server, but
I've never had a pgsql update blow back in my face, and I've done an
awful lot of them.

So you missed 8.1.7 then or weren't using those features at the very least? You also didn't have the stats collector issue with 8.2.3, 8.2.4 took quite some time to come out...PostgreSQL is not perfect, but as you can see by the problems with 8.1.7 the next update was released very very quickly.

The stats collector one made my life miserable for quite some time. But that was all part of a major upgrade that happened to contain a performance regression. The problem had been there since 8.2.0, and major version releases always come with new bugs in the new features. I know I caught it in release validation and held off upgrades until it was dealt with.

I think what Scott was suggesting is that it's generally safe to apply minor revision updates and expect that you'll have less bugs afterwards than you'd have if you didn't apply the update. 8.1.7 was out for only two days before the 8.1.8 fix came out; only the most aggressive upgrade plan would have been bit by that.

If you look at the link I passed along before, you'll see the difference with MySQL is that they've been abusing their customers with minor point releases that try to add new features. Instead some of these introduce functional regressions, which often hang around for a whole long longer than two days after being noticed (this isn't even considering the delays before those fixes make their way back into the open source product, some only even go to paying customers). Sure, the PG stats bug was around for five months before correction, but it was just a performance issue that only showed up under limited circumstances and once it was reported it got squashed fairly quickly.

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* Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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