9.21 Peer Installation

We are currently at 7.31 on AIX 4.3.3 and are preparing to move to 9.21 first on our development system and then the production system. Our front ends are written in 4GL and VB accessing the DB via Intersolv's SequeLink ODBC driver. It would appear that the safest method would be to install 9.21 on the development system without replacing either 7.31 or the 7.31 databases, i.e. a peer installation. What is involved in running the two versions on the same server? (In a former life I had up to four versions of Ingres installed on the same server!) What is involved in selecting one or the other (environment variables, etc.)? Once we are convinced that 9.21 is operating properly, then 7.31 can go away. Are there any other caveats, precautions, etc.? For example, will the 4GL programs need to be recompiled? Thank you, Lucky Lucky Leavell Phone: (800) 481-2393 or (812) 366-4066 UniXpress - Your Source for SCO FAX: (888) 231-9640 or (812) 366-3618 1560 Zoar Church Road NE Email: lucky@UniXpress.com Corydon, IN 47112-7374 WWW Home Page: http://www.UniXpress.com

Just did an upgrade from 7.31 to 9.21 on the AIX 4.3.3 platform. The only kink was that we had to retun the DB after the upgrade. For example, we had to do update statistics on the entire DB and then drop the distributions for all ofthe tables. After that the system hummed. Best of luck! Jeff Kent Sr. Programmer Money Mailer, LLC (714) 265-8489 "Lucky Leavell [RIS]" wrote: > We are currently at 7.31 on AIX 4.3.3 and are preparing to move to 9.21 > first on our development system and then the production system. Our front > ends are written in 4GL and VB accessing the DB via Intersolv's SequeLink > ODBC driver. > > It would appear that the safest method would be to install 9.21 on the > development system without replacing either 7.31 or the 7.31 databases, > i.e. a peer installation. What is involved in running the two versions on > the same server? (In a former life I had up to four versions of Ingres > installed on the same server!) What is involved in selecting one or the > other (environment variables, etc.)? > > Once we are convinced that 9.21 is operating properly, then 7.31 can go > away. > > Are there any other caveats, precautions, etc.? For example, will the 4GL > programs need to be recompiled? > > Thank you, > Lucky > > Lucky Leavell Phone: (800) 481-2393 or (812) 366-4066 > UniXpress - Your Source for SCO FAX: (888) 231-9640 or (812) 366-3618 > 1560 Zoar Church Road NE Email: lucky@UniXpress.com > Corydon, IN 47112-7374 WWW Home Page: http://www.UniXpress.com

Lucky Leavell [RIS] wrote in message ... > > ... What is involved in running the two versions on >the same server? (In a former life I had up to four versions of Ingres >installed on the same server!) What is involved in selecting one or the >other (environment variables, etc.)? > Simply setup another $INFORMIXDIR and load away. We have a convention of putting the engine version as part of the directory name (eg. /something/informix.731) and also I recommend that you do NOT use the home directory of informix because people inevitably leave junk files lying around when they login as informix for administration. But this is only a suggestion... Make sure that the SERVERNUM is different from any other instance on the machine. Make sure the DBSERVERNAME and DBSERVERALIASES are different between the instances, and of course in the sqlhosts file. Each engine can know about the other engine thru the sqlhosts file - no problems there. Since they will be running on the same machine, they will need to have unique port numbers (ie entries from /etc/services) so that one engine only listens to each port. After that, just setup the $INFORMIXDIR $PATH $INFORMIXSERVER $ONCONFIG $INFORMIXSQLHOSTS - have I forgotten any? The usual culprits, anyway... We have little inline shell functions to seamlessly switch between each engine by messing with these environment variables, but they depend somewhat on the total environment so it's probably pointless passing them on. > >Are there any other caveats, precautions, etc.? For example, will the 4GL >programs need to be recompiled? No. not usually. As long as you run a (for example) 7.24 4gl with a 7.24 runner, you are in business. In fact, most times (excepting the odd new runner bugs) the later runners are generally quite capable of running the older pcodes. The only exceptions to this has been when changing from the 4.XX pcode to the 7.XX, and the odd point release which was cranky about specific pcode instructions from other slightly older versions. 7.20.UC8 and 7.20.UD6 in particular can crap out on each other because of some little bug around the open form statement, but that kind of problem is not common these days.