I think the problem is mainly with the package manager.
We cannot ask the administrator to be "up to date" of the issues when upgrading. For small companies where the sysadmin is the same that de dbadmin, there should not be problem. But in large IT departments sysadmins have their own problems and if you don't plan a careful communication procedure between database and general administration groups, this kind of problem will appear soon or later...
With the package it could be easy to show a warning, like apt-get and dpkg do. For example, when upgrading in debian from 8.1 to 8.3, dpkg first install 8.3 in another location, and second shows you a warning about the problems you could find during upgrade. I don't know if yum and rpm can show this type of messages...
Perhaps the problem is more with the package system (rpm and yum) that the administrator... Anyway, it's just my opinion and there are opinions for everybody.
And, of course, database admin should be aware of the problems that could surge after upgrading. So, no upgrade should be taken without knowing what is going to be updated. But this is an internal problem between the sysadmin and the dbadmin. :-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Grittner <
Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov>
To:
pgsql-admin@postgresql.org, Jakov Sosic <
jakov.sosic@srce.hr>
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Yum upgrade of PostgreSQL 8.4 from to rc1 rendered dataunusable
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:58:11 -0500
Jakov Sosic <jakov.sosic@srce.hr> wrote:
> Great thing about package managers is that they resolve all your
> dependencies, that they provide working binaries, that they install
> much faster, that they are searched for in consistent way, etc etc.
I find that when we upgrade to a new major release of PostgreSQL, we
almost always need to have both the old and new major releases
installed at the same time. That overlap may only need to exist for a
few hours, or it may need to persist for months. Any installation
solution which doesn't support that pattern can't be used by many.
You might want to consider some way to support that.
-Kevin