On January 13, 2004 02:31 am, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Yes, but, rhetorically speaking, what are the DBA and SysAdmin together
> supposed to do when the only option is to erase the existing software
> and install new software in its place?

Fix their system so that that isn't the only option.  :-)

> >   But IMHO the only responsible path open to pkgsrc for
> > RDBMSs is to install the next version side-by-side with the old.  The DBA
> > will load the new database; the users will test it; it will go online.
> > Then, after some days or weeks, the old one will be decommissioned.
>
> Unless things have improved significantly since pgsql 7.2 or so then
> that's simply not possible, at least not given the way pkgsrc currently
> installs the software.  I'd love to see proof otherwise, but I'm not
> holding my breath.

This is true.  In the meantime however, I am willing to manage my systems in 
such a way that I don't need them side by side on the same machine.  I still 
need to control when my system goes from 7.3.x to 7.4.x though.  I can manage 
it from there.

I currently manage three installations and I can't imagine any script, even a 
home grown one, that would do the right thing for all three.  One of my 
systems has to manage five separate databases, the largest which is 26GB.  We 
don't even do dump and reloads on that one.  It takes us a week to migrate to 
a new version of the database or significant schema changes without actually 
being down for any appreciable time.  I don't even have space for that dump 
on the machine that builds the packages.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@netbsd.org>
http://www.NetBSD.org/