On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 04:51 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
Just curious here ... but, with all the time you've spent pushing for an
"easy upgrade path", have you looked at the other RDBMSs and how they deal
with upgrades? I think its going to be a sort of apples-to-oranges thing,
since I imagine that most of the 'big ones' don't change their disk
formats anymore ...
That's probably the thing - they've written the on-disk stuff in stone by now. DB2 has
a lot of function rebinding to do, but thats probably a different issue.
Tying to my last post, concerning Joshua's offer to put up the labor if we can put up the dough, given the
fact that Postgres is still in flux, do you think its even possible to do some sort of in-place upgrade, not knowing
what may come up when you're writing 7.6?
In other words, if we pony up and get something written now, will it need further development every time an x.y release comes up.
What I'd be curious about is how badly we compare as far as major releases
are concerned ... I don't believe we've had a x.y.z release yet that
required a dump/reload (and if so, it was a very very special
circumstance), but what about x.y releases? In Oracle's case, i don't
think they do x.y.z releases, do they? Only X and x.y?
Lord, who knows what they're up to. They do (or did) x.y.z releases (I'm using 8.1.6), but publicly they're
calling everything 8i,9i,10g yahdah yahdah yahdah.
I certainly will concede that (to me), upgrading Postgres is easier than Oracle, as I can configure, compile, install,
do an initdb, and generate an entire large DDL in the time it takes the abysmal Oracle installer to even start. Then try
to install/upgrade it on an 'unsupported' linux, like Slack...but I don't have to do anything with the data.
To a PHB/PHC (pointy-haired-client), saying 'Oracle' is like giving them a box of Depends, even though it doesn't save them
from a fire hose. They feel safe.
K, looking back through that it almost sounds like a ramble ... hopefully--------------------
you understand what I'm asking ...
I know when I was at the University, and they dealt with Oracle upgrades,
the guys plan'd for a weekend ...
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