[ On Monday, January 12, 2004 at 16:24:09 (+0100), Michal Pasternak wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: PostgreSQL 7.4.1 anyone?
>
> I will repeat my question. Why do you somehow belive, that doing
> dump/restore by hand will save you from data loss, in case there are errors
> in dump, and DB backend will silently ignore them? Wisely crafted automatic
> script can do its job very well, without any risk of loosing the data.

.... not only that but at least if the database is dumped automatically
before the currently running database software is removed then the data
is safe in a canonical form so that if the new version has to be rolled
back and there are troubles with re-installing the old version, at least
the data can be copied over to another machine (of any architecture)
that might already have the old version still running.

Attempting to save time during an upgrade by not dumping the database is
a very very foolish thing to do.  Individual admins may choose to do
this, but pkgsrc should not be a Fool's Paradise.

Note pkgviews is not (and never will be) the right solution for this
problem either.

It would be nice if the PostgreSQL maintainers would at least try to
take at least a page from the release management practices followed by
GNU Emacs and/or GCC developers and learn to install their software and
tools in versioned directories so that multiple releases could be
installed and perhaps even in live production (on alternate network
ports of course) simultaneously.  Too many software developers pay far
too little attention to operational change management issues.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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