Re: SE to WGS 7.20 Newbe - any suggestions?

On Tue, 07 Apr 1998 15:16:48 GMT, aaronpropes@tierneybros.com (Aaron Propes) wrote: >The company I work for is in the process of upgrading its >OE/Accounting system, and with that we're switching from SE 5.x to WGS >7.20. > >I'm currently RTFM-ing, but I was wondering if anyone had any >suggestions, warnings, or things to look out for. We're running SCO >OpenServer 5.0.2 on Pentium box. We have SE 5.x, 7.x and IDS 7.x installations on SCO OpenServer 5.0.x and other SCO OS's. The upgrade is normally easy on the condition that you realy do your RTFM thorougly. That means reading every page from beginning to end in the administration guide, backup (ontape) and possibly some other manuals. If there is anything you don't understand fully you can either ask here in c.d.i. or you will have to bite the bullet and go to a course. It's a good idea to serch the news group at http://www.dejanews.com before you ask though. (Sorry IIUG, but dejanews is so much better than the search engine at the IIUG site.) The main thing to look out for in my opinon are the update statistics commands you absolutly must run. Check out the http://www.iiug.org software archives for the utils_ak and soon I think the utils2_ak from Art Kagel for programs that will generate update statistics commands for you. He is *the* resident expert on the theme (and so many other things) here in c.d.i. Your backup strategy will be quite different. You will probably want to use untape for the purpose. Go to the FAQ at the same web site and find how to set that up to run from cron. It's quite critical that you do it as explained in the faq (not as suggested a milion times here in c.d.i. from people who haven't read this part of the faq). In the manuals it's said that you should run ontape from a terminal. Few organizations can afford to do that. The faq solution for using cron works great though and is fully supported by Informix. Of course you will have to run continous log backup as well. Study how it should be done and make sure you have enough log space (with many logs set to an appropriate size) and the configuration parameters set appropriately. It's relatively easy when you understand how logs are used. With logs you have to make sure you avoide a long transactions at all costs. A long transaction that fills your logs will crash your database, but is relative easy to avoid. Setting the high water mark variables correctly and making sure your continous log backup is actually running is quite critical. Don't try to use onarchive for backup. It isn't worth it unless you have some very special needs. It will not be that long before IDS 7.3 is available on SCO as well and you will be able to use onbar if ontape isn't good enough. (You can of course use onbar in your current release as well, but most don't like the idea of spending that much dollars on a third party backup manager for a small site.) >Thanks in advance, >Aaron Propes Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: Primary with ODBC info: http://www.smooth1.demon.co.uk Official site http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html