A migration question

I am working on a migration plan for a 24 by 7 site. We are migrating from IDS 9.3 to IDS 9.4 and although it would be possible to achieve this by a simple install of 9.4 over 9.3 it is never that easy. The 9.3 installation has two major problems. rootdbs has been created with offset 0 on AIX 5.2 64-bit in an HACMP environment. It works, but I am assured by my IBM AIX specialists that this is a potential disaster area. Many of the tables have large numbers of extents. Nobody ever thought to set extent sizes for any of the databases. The site currently has about 20 dbspaces, and apart from the "critical" dbspaces all the dbspaces have multiple chunks and one has about 20. We do have an amount of free space, (not enough to fully duplicate) and I am contemplating creating a new instance for 9.4 and migrating over a long period of time, probably by exporting databases and importing them with correct extent sizes. But last night in the bath I had a brainwave and I would like your views. Could I create a 9.4 instance and migrate one table at a time using synonyms to provide access to tables that are in the other server? If I could do that then I can minimise the duration of outages. I don't think I would save any time in the long run but it might just be a little more feasible. regards Malcolm sending to informix-list