We’re doing a version upgrade to one of our major client’s here. Before doing the final upgrade, we did a test demo upgrade and it took four days in total for a 85GB database.
Our customer is only ready to give us one and a half to two days of downtime. He wants to continue the posting from the next day. They have around 200 users in different geographical areas. What he suggests is Once we finish the Upgrade, he wants us to add the data of the two days into the new upgraded database.
Now, our major concern is, how we should progress in after the upgrade? How to bring in the left over data from the old version database to the new upgraded database?
I would suggest looking at optimising the upgrade time. It is very likely that putting the db onto a box with top of the line disks, fast disk controller etc that the upgrade time would reduce significantly. You need to speak to a systems person - someone with good experience of setting up high performance systems. If you can go back to the client and say to them - ‘we can reduce the downtime by 50% but it will require you spend 2k on a new PC’ I doubt there will be much problem. If you do the upgrade on a long weekend as well then that gives you three days. Forget importing data - its too risky. There is no way you can guarantee the imported data. You will be plagued forever by incriminations of reports, inventories, etc being incorrect due to the imported data.
I think there maybe confusion about what is practical from the technical point of view, and what is acceptable from the client point of view. I don’t think there is a viable compromise doing it this way, but let’s look at the issues.
The biggest issue is communicating to the client exactly what is going on, and having them understand what they are accepting. The client has been told;
But that is not what they heard; the customer heard this.
Technically of course anything can be done, but the idea that during a week, the customer will not post anything will not edit and cards, and all they will do is enter orders into the system, will not be acceptable to them.
There are ways to make a “phased upgrade” but the suggestion made in this case is the wrong one.
It is necessary to optimize the code in the conversion process to make it faster.
Thank you. That was a very useful piece of advise. Myself and my team-mates had a lot of things in our mind on how we should progress in doing the “Data Filling” after the upgrade, but now most of us are clear on atleast one thing.
‘We should concentrate in reducing the downtime of the main upgrade’.