All,
I'm planning a migration for a customer with a PostgreSQL 8.4 database cluster running CentOS 4.8 32-bit. The target platform is CentOS 6.2 64-bit and will be running PostgreSQL 8.4 (our application delivers and supports 8.4, don't bother bringing up 9.x). If this were a small database cluster I wouldn't worry about it however the 8.4 database cluster is about 900 GB right now. The documented and proper way to move this data is via a dump-restore however I'm not sure my customer wants days or potentially weeks of downtime so I'm searching for options.
Option 1: dump-restore
I've performed a handful of these for other customers and even the 100 GB database cluster using the network transfer method "pg_dumpall | ssh target -c 'cat - | psql postgres'" can be slow as in 8+ hours.
Option 2: Slony-I
Is Slony-I an alternative when moving data from 32-bit to 64-bit?
Option 3: pg_upgrade
Is this an option? Remember, I'm going from 8.4 32-bit to 8.4 64-bit.
Option 4: PITR
I believe this is not a possibility because of the bit-ness change but I'm listing anyways in case I'm mistaken.
Did I miss anything?
TIA,
Greg