PostgreSQL 8.1 Released [LWN.net]

PostgreSQL 8.1 Released

Posted Nov 9, 2005 1:37 UTC (Wed) by yem (guest, #1138)
Parent article: PostgreSQL 8.1 Released

Huge congrats and thanks to all the devs, documenters and testers! 8.1 is an impressive improvement over 7.x. The multiple condition index optimisations have seen queries which typically took 20-30 minutes to run on 7.3 complete in around 10 seconds on the same hardware. Night and day.

Now if we can just get a properly documented method for implementing PITR (or slony1's new log shipping feature).. then I can kiss Sybase good bye.

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PostgreSQL 8.1 Released

Posted Nov 9, 2005 19:05 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I thought that PITR was a feature of 8.1, is it just missing documentation or did it get pulled prior to release?

PITR included

Posted Nov 10, 2005 1:53 UTC (Thu) by yem (guest, #1138) [Link]

It's there - just poorly documented. For example, to ensure you're taking a full backup you need to copy the CURRENT WAL log file. But the docs do not specify a way to tell which file that might be out of the dozen files in pg_xlog/. A reference backup and restore script would be great to have.

Still, the PITR system requires you to backup and restore the whole server in one go - you cannot do just one database (AFAIK). Slony1 appears to be able to handle database by database, but again the log shipping feature is underdocumented and geared towards replication. Slony is also fairly invasive in that it adds columns to your tables where required and requires all tables to be specified in slonik config/commands.

Nobody thinks of backups :(