>  I strongly disagree with you. Any decent RDBMS such as Postgres should
> and I think will have eventually a decent upgrade and migration tool
> rather than using the conventional time-consuming dump and reload. What
> if your db is in terabyte size like many enterprise-level ones nowadays!
> I think this an essential tool for enterprise postgres implementations.

I agree in part...

Yes, I think there should be a more direct migration mechanism, in the
long term.  I understand some people at Sun may be starting to work on
this.

What you have today, here, is Slony-I; that's the present workaround.

Bashing the options that you *do* have when they're not as nice as what we
might like to someday have is in poor taste particularly when talking with
the people that invested in creating what *is* available.

If these things are, as you say, "essential," a natural next question is:
What are you doing to contribute to making them available?  Wishing
migration tools into existence doesn't happen; it requires a lot of work.

If they're so essential, in your view, then can we assume you'll be
contributing time and/or money to building upgrade capabilities into
PostgreSQL 8.4?  Now's the time to start the effort...