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0 pointsfalcolas14y ago0 comments

Speaking only in broad generalities, it's because PostgreSQL was not suitable for large scale businesses until lately. The lack of replication, limited performance on multiple cores, etc. drove businesses to MySQL/Oracle in the past, and inertia keeps them there now.

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vidarh14y ago· 3 in thread

The big deal for me:

Upgrading Postgres between major versions requires a dump and restore or using upgrade tools, meaning potentially long downtime, unless you set up some really ugly replication solutions.

I have servers I'm upgrading to 9.1 now, from 8.x, and we have wasted lots of time on it on some really hacky solutions because taking the downtime required to do an offline upgrade is just not acceptable.

We'd have paid thousands to avoid that problem, as that's what the time spent on avoiding that downtime is costing us (well, our clients).

j-kidd14y ago

I think it is fairly reasonable to expect such downtime for major version upgrade. Is there a DBMS vendor that can promise you otherwise?

einhverfr14y ago

Look into pg_upgrade.

vidarh14y ago

It still requires the server to be taken down during the upgrade, and has a bunch of limitations that means it's still more cost effective for us to spend a few days on ugly custom hacks to avoid the pain.

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