Re: Thoughts on maintaining 7.3

>With 7.4 I'm finding upgrading to be easier.  I'll likely upgrade out 
>production servers to 7.4.0 when it comes out and wind up skipping 7.3 
>altogether.
>  
>

Sure but I talking about people who are running 7.3 and are happy with 
it. The reality is that for probably 95% of the people
out there , there is no reason for 7.4. When you have existing system 
that works... why upgrade? That is one of the benefits
of Open Source stuff, we no longer get force into un-needed upgrade cycles.

We use PostgreSQL for everything, and I don't have any inclination to 
upgrade to 7.4 except that it is 7.4. I only have two
customers that will see any real benefit from going to 7.4. The rest are 
going to stay on 7.3 because they don't want:

A. The downtime
B. Unknown or unexpected problems
C. A brand new database
D. Migration costs

When you deal with the systems I do, the cost to a customer to migrate 
to 7.4 would be in the minimum of 10,000-20,000 dollars.
They start to ask why were upgrading with those numbers.

That is not to say that 7.4 is not worth it from a technical sense but 
for my customers, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a mantra and
the reality is that 7.3 is not broke in their minds. There is 
limitations pg_dump/pg_restore has some issues, having to reindex the 
database
(which 7.4 doesn't fix), vacuum (which 7.4 doesn't fix) but my customers 
accept them as that.

Your mileage may vary but I can only talk from my experience.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake





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