Hi,


    I am testing the upgrade of my prod database using Slony-1 1.1.5. 
Our database size is around 50gig and there are some 10-20 tables with 
millions of records ranging from 5 mil to almost 120million in one big 
table.

    Here is what I did so far.

1) Installed 8.0.3 on my Master node and took a pg_dump of the latest 
copy from the production database and restored.

2) Installed 8.1.3 on my Slave node and took a pg_dump of a week old 
pg_dump backup copy and restored.


    At this point Slave database is One week behind , I want Slony to 
replicate the changes from past week and bring 8.1.3 upto date with the 
current 8.0.3 data.

   So, I installed Slony on Master and Slave and ran the initial 
configuration script as per docs and added all the 160 tables into the 
replication set.

3) Started replication daemons on Master and Slave respectively
  
    slon $CLUSTERNAME "dbname=$MASTERDBNAME user=$REPLICATIONUSER 
host=$MASTERHOST"  
   
    slon $CLUSTERNAME "dbname=$SLAVEDBNAME user=$REPLICATIONUSER 
host=$SLAVEHOST" 

4) Then did the subscribe set   
   
    subscribe set ( id = 1, provider = 1, receiver = 2, forward = no);


5) Once the subscribe set is issued, I started noticing on the Slave 
Node log

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."bankaccount" succeeded
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."bankaccounttype" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."chargeback" succeeded
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."chargebacknotice" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."creditcard" succeeded
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."payment" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."paymentauthorization" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."paymentmethod" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."paymentmethodtype" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."paymentprocessor" failed - doing delete
NOTICE:  truncate of "billing"."refund" succeeded
NOTICE:  truncate of "listing"."address" failed - doing delete
2006-04-20 12:28:39 EDT DEBUG1 cleanupThread:    5.728 seconds for 
cleanupEvent()
2006-04-20 12:28:39 EDT DEBUG1 cleanupThread:    0.037 seconds for 
delete logs
2006-04-20 12:39:34 EDT DEBUG1 cleanupThread:    1.287 seconds for 
cleanupEvent()
2006-04-20 12:39:34 EDT DEBUG1 cleanupThread:    0.197 seconds for 
delete logs
2006-04-20 12:50:51 EDT DEBUG1 cleanupThread:    0.005 seconds for 
cleanupEvent()
2006-04-20 12:50:51 EDT DEBUG1 cleanupThread:    0.003 seconds for 
delete logs
.
.
.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is still trying to sync up listing.address table from past 4 hours, 
this table has around 5 million records.



  From the log it tells me that it is either truncating/deleting each 
and every table and inserting data back into the tables using the COPY 
data from the Master node.

  Is this the expected behavior ? I was under the impression that it 
would just insert the Delta (one week data from) records for each table, 
instead of deleting and reinserting the whole data ?

  If this is the case I dont know how many days/weeks/months it would 
take to catch up.

  Am I missing something  here ? This is my first attempt to use Slony 
Replication , please advice.

 I need to upgrade our production database from 8.0.3 to 8.1.3 with very 
minimum downtime.


Thanks!
Pallav