[Spacewalk-list] Thoughts on upgrade/conversion to PostgreSQL

[Milan Zazrivec]

> I may have accidentally painted myself into a corner here.  Looking for
> opinions…
> 
> Currently I have a Spacewalk 1.6 server which was set up using Oracle 11 XE
> for testing purposes.  It has been working great, and at 1.6 there were
> some concerns about PostgreSQL support being weak.
> 
> Today I noticed that Oracle started complaining that we exceeded the 11GB
> limit.  Oops.  My mistake.
> 
> I'm willing to give PostgreSQL a spin now, but with the Oracle DB full, I'm
> concerned that any "normal" upgrade process might need to write to it
> which would be denied and break the upgrade scripts.
> 
> Would order-of-operation help in this case?  For example, could the process
> at https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/PostgreSQLFromOracle be used to
> convert to PostgreSQL in place on 1.6, and then an immediate upgrade to
> 1.7?
> 
> Worst-case, I have a second server doing nothing at the moment, and it can
> be built up as a PostgreSQL 1.7 machine and all clients re-registered to
> the new server -- I was just thinking through ideas on how to get the
> current server up to PostgreSQL/1.7 directly.
> 
> That's question number one.
> 
> Question two would be… are there any good options for seeing if there's any
> wasted space in the Oracle DB and compressing it down to possibly get
> through the normal upgrade and conversion processes?  Perhaps this should
> have been question number one.  I'm not an Oracle expert, and would love
> to be rid of it anyway…

My recommendation would be to migrate from 1.6 Oracle to 1.6 PostgreSQL and
then do a 1.6 -> 1.7 upgrade on PostgreSQL.

Technically, other than the database backend, there's no difference between
upgrading first, migrating afterwards and doing it the other way around.

-Milan Zázrivec