Re: How would you guys do this?

Spetc@aol.com wrote: > We are going to move our 5.0 database to another machine running 7.1. > (We will be taking advantage of the extra features such as fragmentation.) > It is approximately 20Gb. > We are a 24 hour operation and wish to do it is as qucikly as possible. > dbexport / dbimport would do it, but that is slow. Is there a quicker way? This comes a little late but: Assuming your 7.1 server is a different machine alltogether: Build your world on the new server exactly as it is on the old one, ( i.e. a 5.x Engine ). Take an informix archive of your old system and restore it over the new one. When the restore process asks for log tapes flush the logs from the old system and shut it down ( or allow read only access ) quickly move the tape over to the new system and roll them forward. With this method, you've effectively moved to the new system with an amount of down time equal to the time it takes to roll forward about 3 to 6 hours of logs! I'd say less than an hour, especially if you do this off-peak. Granted, you still have to upgrade this engine to 7.1, which will require a rebuild of all your indexes, but you now have a problem that is much less complicated. I'm not certain wheather tbunload will work with such a large database, but it is several orders of magnitude faster than dbexport/dbimport, and it will by default re-write all your tables back into just one extent! However, this tool will not work betweed 5.x and 7.x. kevin