postgresql & yum

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 08 March 2004 05:29 am, Kiss Gábor wrote:
> the update of postgresql with yum makes the full
> database backup, sql server update, database conversion and
> database restore too?

No.  As Seth has said, yum will rely on the %pre and %post scriptlets embedded 
in the RPM to do things.  As the upstream maintainer for PostgreSQL, I can 
tell you with certainty that if you use yum, apt, up2date, or any other 
upgrade mechanism to upgrade PostgreSQL from one major version to another 
major version you will need to make sure that you take all the steps 
necessary to back up and migrate your database to the new version.  You will 
have to dump and restore manually. If you do not do this you will need to 
downgrade PostgreSQL and then do this.  Nothing is done automatically; there 
is too great of a chance of data loss between some versions of PostgreSQL if 
things are not done exactly right (things like user compiled C functions, for 
instance, cannot be migrated in place, they have to be recompiled).

There are a lot of reasons for this; see the archives of the PostgreSQL 
[HACKERS] mailing list for the details.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu