8.03 versus 8.04

alex.cotarlan@thomson.com wrote:

Can anyone specify from his/her experience what would be the benefits of using postgresql 8.04 versus 8.03 in terms of reliability and/or performance.
My organizations intends to upgrade one of the servers from 7.3 to 8.03 (the version of the secondary server) or to 8.04 which is the latest 8.0x. I would tend to chose 8.03 which seems pretty stable so far but I would like to hear from other from other people.
We are talking about a database which has about 100GB data. with some of the tables holding 20GB or more.

Well 8.0.5 is out in a week...

Remember that the .x releases are bug fixes and you should be running them.

Joshua D. Drake

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 01:34:19PM -0500, alex.cotarlan@thomson.com wrote:

Can anyone specify from his/her experience what would be the benefits
of using postgresql 8.04 versus 8.03 in terms of reliability and/or
performance.

See the 8.0.4 Release Notes for a description of the changes, most
of which concern reliability:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/release.html#RELEASE-8-0-4

Notice that nearly all items include words like "fix" or "improve
robustness."

My organizations intends to upgrade one of the servers from 7.3 to
8.03 (the version of the secondary server) or to 8.04 which is the
latest 8.0x. I would tend to chose 8.03 which seems pretty stable so
far but I would like to hear from other from other people.

Why would you prefer 8.0.3 over 8.0.4? PostgreSQL's point releases
aren't for adding new features but rather for fixing known problems,
so in theory a branch's latest point release should be the best
version in that branch. It's possible that one of the fixes will
introduce a new problem so you have to weigh that unknown against
the known problems that were fixed, but it's not like a new point
release represents new development.

BTW, the developers are talking about making new point releases
next week, so you might want to consider 8.0.5 when it comes out.

If you have a test environment then consider looking at the 8.1
branch. For certain queries you might see a marked improvement in
performance.

--
Michael Fuhr

Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org> writes:

Why would you prefer 8.0.3 over 8.0.4? PostgreSQL's point releases
aren't for adding new features but rather for fixing known problems,
so in theory a branch's latest point release should be the best
version in that branch. It's possible that one of the fixes will
introduce a new problem so you have to weigh that unknown against
the known problems that were fixed, but it's not like a new point
release represents new development.

Offhand I can remember only two cases in which we've introduced
regressions in point releases. Compared to the number of bugs fixed
in point releases, the argument for not using the latest point release
in a given series is mighty weak.

regards, tom lane

On 12/3/2005 1:34 PM, alex.cotarlan@thomson.com wrote:

Can anyone specify from his/her experience what would be the benefits of using postgresql 8.04 versus 8.03 in terms of reliability and/or performance.

Unless forced because there is no other way to fix a bug, we do not
change any functionality of the system within a release branch. The
PostgreSQL version number has three components:

<major>.<minor>.<patchlevel>

Every minor release has its own branch within the source repository.
Only bugfixes will be applied to a release branch. So you can safely
assume that the difference between x.y.z1 and x.y.z2 is reliablity and
very unlikely performance.

Jan

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