------------------------------------------------------------------------------ PG_MIGRATOR: IN-PLACE UPGRADES FOR POSTGRESQL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Upgrading a PostgreSQL database from one major release to another can be an expensive process. For minor upgrades, you can simply install new executables and forget about upgrading existing data. But for major upgrades, you have to export all of your data using pg_dump, install the new release, run initdb to create a new cluster, and then import your old data. If you have a lot of data, that can take a considerable amount of time. If you have too much data, you may have to buy more storage since you need enough room to hold the original data plus the exported data. pg_migrator can reduce the amount of time and disk space required for many upgrades. The URL http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/pg_migrator.pdf contains a presentation about pg_migrator internals that mirrors the text description below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WHAT IT DOES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ pg_migrator is a tool that performs an in-place upgrade of existing data. Some upgrades change the on-disk representation of data; pg_migrator cannot help in those upgrades. However, many upgrades do not change the on-disk representation of a user-defined table. In those cases, pg_migrator can move existing user-defined tables from the old database cluster into the new cluster. There are two factors that determine whether an in-place upgrade is practical. Every table in a cluster shares the same on-disk representation of the table headers and trailers and the on-disk representation of tuple headers. If this changes between the old version of PostgreSQL and the new version, pg_migrator cannot move existing tables to the new cluster; you will have to pg_dump the old data and then import that data into the new cluster. Second, all data types should have the same binary representation between the two major PostgreSQL versions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HOW IT WORKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To use pg_migrator during an upgrade, start by installing a fresh cluster using the newest version in a new directory. When you've finished installation, the new cluster will contain the new executables and the usual template0, template1, and postgres, but no user-defined tables. At this point, you can shut down the old and new postmasters and invoke pg_migrator. When pg_migrator starts, it ensures that all required executables are present and contain the expected version numbers. The verification process also checks the old and new $PGDATA directories to ensure that the expected files and subdirectories are in place. If the verification process succeeds, pg_migrator starts the old postmaster and runs pg_dumpall --schema-only to capture the metadata contained in the old cluster. The script produced by pg_dumpall will be used in a later step to recreate all user-defined objects in the new cluster. Note that the script produced by pg_dumpall will only recreate user-defined objects, not system-defined objects. The new cluster will contain the system-defined objects created by the latest version of PostgreSQL. Once pg_migrator has extracted the metadata from the old cluster, it performs a number of bookkeeping tasks required to 'sync up' the new cluster with the existing data. First, pg_migrator renames any tablespace directories in the old cluster --- the new cluster will need to use the same tablespace directories and will complain if those directories exist when pg_migrator imports the metadata in a later step. It then freeze all transaction information stored in old server rows. Next, pg_migrator copies the commit status information and 'next transaction ID' from the old cluster to the new cluster. This is the steps ensures that the proper tuples are visible from the new cluster. Remember, pg_migrator does not export/import the content of user-defined tables so the transaction IDs in the new cluster must match the transaction IDs in the old data. pg_migrator also copies the starting address for write-ahead logs from the old cluster to the new cluster. Now pg_migrator begins reconstructing the metadata obtained from the old cluster using the first part of the pg_dumpall output. Once all of the databases have been created in the new cluster, pg_migrator tackles the problem of naming toast relations. Toast tables are used to store oversized data out-of-line, i.e., in a separate file. When the server decides to move a datum out of a tuple and into a toast table, it stores a pointer in the original slot in the tuple. That pointer contains the relfilenode (i.e. filename) of the toast table. That means that any table which contains toasted data will contain the filename of the toast table in each toast pointer. Therefore, it is very important that toast tables retain their old names when they are created in the new cluster. CREATE TABLE does not offer any explicit support for naming toast tables. To ensure that the toast table names retain their old names, pg_migrator reserves the name of each toast table before importing the metadata from the old cluster. To reserve a filename, pg_migrator simply creates an empty file with the appropriate name and the server avoids that name when it detects a collision. Next, pg_migrator executes the remainder of the script produced earlier by pg_dumpall --- this script effectively creates the complete user-defined metadata from the old cluster to the new cluster. When that script completes, pg_migrator, after shutting down the new postmaster, deletes the placeholder toast tables and sets the proper toast tuple names into the new cluster. Finally, pg_migrator links or copies each user-defined table and its supporting indexes and toast tables from the old cluster to the new cluster. In this last step, pg_migrator assigns a new name to each relation so it matches the pg_class.relfilenode in the new cluster. Toast file names are preserved, as outlined above. An important feature of the pg_migrator design is that it leaves the original cluster intact --- if a problem occurs during the upgrade, you can still run the previous version, after renaming the tablespaces back to the original names.