pg_upgrade fails with an unspecified error

Question

I’m running Postgres 9.1’s pg_ugrade to migrate from 9.0 to 9.1 on Windows x64. After editing the permissions to allow full trust, running the tool as the postgres user, and working around a bug whereby pg_upgrade leaves the "old" store locked and refusing to run again ("there seems to be a postmaster servicing old cluster"), it now fails without explaining what’s wrong:

Performing Consistency Checks
-----------------------------
Checking current, bin, and data directories                 ok
Checking cluster versions                                   ok
Checking database user is a superuser                       ok
Checking for prepared transactions                          ok
Checking for reg* system oid user data types                ok
Checking for contrib/isn with bigint-passing mismatch       ok
Creating catalog dump                                       ok

There were problems executing ""C:\Progs\Postgres\9.0\bin/pg_ctl" -w -l "nul" -D "C:\Progs\Postgres\9.0-data"  stop >> "nul" 2>&1"

Failure, exiting

Is this tool production-ready or am I wasting my time? If this is what I should be doing, what are your suggestions for solving the current failure?

Answer 1

Basically pg_upgrade is production ready.

Unfortunately the early builds of 9.1 had some bugs related to pg_upgrade and Windows. These were fixed in 9.1.3 as far as I know.

Answer 2

This is a minor version and, as such, you shouldn't need to run pg_upgrade. My understanding is that pg_upgrade is only for major version upgrades (e.g. 8.4 -> 9.0)

Edit:

I stand corrected.

• Do your Windows Event logs give any more detail about what's going on?
• Have you tried the alternate path described in the link you provided (17.6.1. Upgrading Data via pg_dump)?

Edit 2:

I've honestly never used pg_upgrade and have only ever gone about it using pg_dump. Are you using the -l switch and dumping the session to a log?

Also, based on the error, it looks like postgres is having a hard time starting. Have you tried manually starting the server?