Migrating Postgres 7.0 to 7.1

Pascal Scheffers (pascal@scheffers.net)

I was a bit scared to 'just update to Postgres 7.1 and be done with it' So with the help of Don Baccus and Roberto Mello this is a how-to upgrade a (live) OpenACS system with a minimal amount of down-time. I wrote this document while trying the entire procedure over-and-over again on a Redhat 6.2 system with the Postgres 7.0.3 RPM-version installed. This should work on many other setups, but you may, obviously need to change some paths. You will end up with a system that has both Postgres 7.0 and 7.1 installed and running. Uninstalling the old version is an exercise I will leave to the reader.

I would not recommend this procedure on a machine with less than 256MB of RAM.


Table of Contents
1. Compiling Postgres 7.1
1.1. Downloading Postgres 7.1
1.2. Extracting the Postgres Sources
1.3. Compiling
1.4. Initializing the Database
1.5. Starting the Postmaster
1.6. Compiling the Postgres Driver
2. Moving your ACS data to 7.1
2.1. Backing up the old data
2.2. Restoring the data
3. Pointing AOLServer to the new Postgres
4. Installing a new ACS