Re: Python 2.5 vs the buildfarm

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> Someone taking the step from Python 2.4 to 2.5 might as well do a major 
> upgrade of PostgreSQL as well.

It takes a few seconds to upgrade Python versions, and I know I've 
installed Python 2.5 from source on a production server before while not 
touching anything else (after going through that process on a staging 
duplicate).

How long it takes to upgrade PostgreSQL is proportional to the size of 
your database, and that can easily take far longer than an acceptable 
downtime window.  This is how you can end up companies who are up to date 
on everything else on their server, but still running an old PostgreSQL.

I once watched a company roll out a shiny new server (on the same 
architecture) to improve performance, with the newer Linux distribution 
required to support that hardware.  But they downgraded to an older PG 
version so it could still run against the existing database, on an 
external array, because that was too big to dump and reload before the 
system had to be back up.  As Greg was pointing out, such craziness really 
does happy specifically because there's no good upgrade in place mechanism 
available.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD