Re: pg_migrator issue with contrib

Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > I did know that EDB had been using the tool for a while, but I admit  
> > I'm not familiar with the whole history.  I had the impression that  
> > we'd gotten a lot more serious about really making this rock solid  
> > since Bruce took it in February.  But maybe that's not the case?
> 
> I don't actually know the EDB end of the history either; maybe someone
> can educate us about that.  But it's true that the core developers,
> at least, weren't taking it seriously until this year.  That's because
> it really can only handle catalog changes, not changes to the contents
> of user tables; and it's been quite a long time since we've had a
> release where we didn't change tuple header layout or packing rules or
> something that made it a nonstarter.  It wasn't clear till early this
> year that 8.3->8.4 would be a cycle where pg_migrator had a chance of
> being useful in production ... so we got serious about it.
> 
> (I do not know whether EDB ever really used it in production.  If they
> did, it must have been for private updates that changed catalogs and
> not user data.)

pg_migrator verion 0.5 is still on the pg_migrator web site, and that is
the version I started from.  It had this line in the intro:
PG_migrator is a tool (not a complete solution) that performs anin-place upgrade of existing data.

Of course no one wants a toolkit, they want a full solution, so I
modified the code to be easier to use and more robust.  I am not sure
how much EDB used it.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +