diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/pgupgrade.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/pgupgrade.sgml index c167cd9703f..261177c9031 100644 --- a/doc/src/sgml/pgupgrade.sgml +++ b/doc/src/sgml/pgupgrade.sgml @@ -17,9 +17,19 @@ - pg_upgrade works because, though new features are - regularly added to PostgreSQL major releases, the internal data storage - format rarely changes. pg_upgrade does its best to + Major PostgreSQL releases regularly add new features that often + change the layout of the system tables, but the internal data storage + format rarely changes. pg_upgrade uses this fact + to perform rapid upgrades by creating new system tables and simply + reusing the old user data files. If a future major release ever + changes the data storage format in a way that makes the old data + format unreadable, pg_upgrade will not be usable + for such upgrades. (The community will attempt to avoid such + situations.) + + + + pg_upgrade does its best to make sure the old and new clusters are binary-compatible, e.g. by checking for compatible compile-time settings, including 32/64-bit binaries. It is important that diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml index 504881d5294..4f59fd19c2b 100644 --- a/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml +++ b/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml @@ -1692,17 +1692,13 @@ pg_dumpall -p 5432 | psql -d postgres -p 5433 - Other data migration methods + Non-Dump Upgrade Methods - The contrib program - pg_upgrade - allows an installation to be migrated in-place from one major - PostgreSQL version to the next. Keep in mind that this - method does not provide any scope for running old and new versions - concurrently. Also, pg_upgrade is much less - battle-tested than pg_dump, so having an - up-to-date backup is strongly recommended in case something goes wrong. + The pg_upgrade module allows an + installation to be migrated in-place from one major + PostgreSQL version to the next. Upgrades can be + performed in minutes.