On Sun, 05 May 2002 10:01:57 EDT, the world broke into rejoicing as mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > It is sunday morning and I have been musing about some PostgreSQL issues. As > some of you are aware, my dot com, dot died, and I am working on a business > plan for a consulting company which, amongst other things, will feature > PostgreSQL. As I am working on the various aspects, some issue pop up about > PostgreSQL. > > Please don't take any of these personally, they are only my observations, if > you say they are non issues I would rather just accept that we disagree than > get into a nasty fight. They *are* issues to a corporate acceptance, I have > been challenged by IT people about them. > > (1) Major version upgrade. This is a hard one, having to dump out and > restore a database to go from 7.1 to 7.2 or 7.2 to 7.3 is really a > hard sell. If a customer has a very large database, this represents a > large amount of down-time. If they are running on an operating system > with file-size limitations it is not an easy task. It also means that > they have to have additional storage which amount to at least a copy > of the whole database.
All of these things are true, and what you should throw back at the IT people is the question: "So what do you do when you upgrade from Oracle 7 to Oracle 8? How about the process of doing major Informix upgrades? Sybase? Does it not involve some appreciable amounts of down-time?" There may well be possible improvements to the PostgreSQL upgrade process; "zero-downtime, zero-extra space upgrades" do not seem likely to be amongst those things. The last time I did an SAP upgrade, there were _five days_ of down-time. Not 15 minutes, not "none," but rather a figure rather close to a week. For the IT guys to have sour grapes over upgrades requiring some time and disk space is unsurprising; for them to pretend it is only a problem with PostgreSQL is just dishonest. -- (concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@ntlug.org") http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/ "Marketing Division, Sirius Cybernetics Corp: A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
