>>> On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 7:04 PM, in message
<659.1164589442@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> . . . it seems that most of
> the chatter on pgsql- hackers since beta started has been about ideas
for
> 8.3 development. Have we caused that by deciding to have a short
8.3
> devel cycle, ie, do people feel they needed a head start? If so,
it's
> bad, but the damage is already done, and won't be repeated as long as
we
> go back to a more normal schedule after 8.3. If there's another
force
> at work, what is it?
>
> I am a bit worried about this, because we're predicating the
decision
> to release 8.2 now on the lack of bug reports; if that's due to lack
of
> testing rather than lack of bugs, we might have a disaster in the
> making. But there's no way to know that now, and really I see no
value
> in being fearful at this point. If we delayed a month, we'd be in
> pretty much just the same situation a month from now.
For what it's worth, we have not had any problems with the 8.2beta3
release.
We converted one of our databases which contains statewide circuit
court data to beta3 on November 11th, as soon as the beta3 release was
available. We've been replicating data from all 72 county databases
since then with no trouble. We did a stress simulating our public web
traffic (http://wcca.wicourts.gov) by using HTTP requests from our log
files and multiple renderers and got fantastic performance. (It settled
in at 120 to 150 web requests per second, with an average of 5 to 10
queries run per request. The Java middle tiers through which all data
pass were running on the same box, and the replication was active at the
time.)
We have also been using beta3 for our development and first stage
testing of new software, and have recently converted on copy of our
largest database (a 400 GB searchable transaction repository) with no
problems.
While we have avoided serving up data to the pubic or to the court
system end users from the beta databases, I would feel comfortable doing
that with this release right now should our production copies all fail.
That is based on both our experience and the fact that they only change
which is a new "bug" in 8.2 was (in my eyes at least) strictly a
cosmetic issue -- nobody should rely on the order of columns when using
"SELECT *". It's unfortunate that we have to go through another initdb
/ pg_dump on these, but I understand the arguments for the change, and
we did know it was still beta when we decided to go that way.
-Kevin
