On Nov 12, 2010, at 8:14 AM, Kyriacos Kyriacou wrote: > We are still using PostgreSQL 8.2.4. We are running a 24x7 system and > database size is over 200Gb so upgrade is not an easy decision!
This is why we have slony, so you can slowly upgrade your 200Gb while you're live and then only suffer a minute or so of downtime while you switchover. Even if you only install slony for the point of the upgrade and then uninstall it after you're done, that seems well worth it to me rather than running on 8.2.4 for a while. Note there were some changes between 8.2 and 8.3 in regards to casting that might make you revisit your application.