Re: Upgrading to 7.22 or better

Tauren Mills wrote: > > I am using Informix Online 7.12 on a Sun Solaris 2.5.1 system. > > I also have Online 7.22 and would like to upgrade to it. How difficult > is this to do? What do I need to watch out for? I need to do this on a > production machine, so how much downtime can I expect? You need enough free space in the rootdb dbspace to hold the new sysutils database (<1000 pages) and space for a few new sysmaster table entries in sysmaster:systables, sysindexes, etc (maybe another 100 pages). The upgrade is painless. Note that new indexes created under 7.2x use an additional 4 bytes per node so allow disk space for any indexes that you plan to drop and recreate and for any new indexes. Existing indexes can continue to be used without rebuilding (unlike upgrading from 5.0x or 6.00). You ay want to adjust some config parameters after a time, the I/O functions became much faster in 7.21+ so you will need fewer AIO VPs if you do not use KAIO and fewer page cleaners to keep up. You will need time to bring the engine down, switch the INFORMIXDIR environment to the 7.22 directory for your session and for new users logging in (if users cannot be made to log out you will need to rename the 7.12 directory and make a symbolic link for the original 7.12 directory name to the 7.22 directory) and restart the engine. In general, 7.2x starts up in about 1/2 the time as 7.13 did and 7.13 was noticable faster than 7.12. It takes about 5 minutes to update sysmaster and create sysutils. Some of the times that I have done this (5 out of 10) the update to sysmaster has failed the first time but the engine came up. Shutting down and restarting caused the update to sysmaster to succeed the second time everytime. Overall downtime should be less than 20 minutes and could be as short as ten minutes if it works the first time and you have everything ready before you start and a good checklist. > > Is there a newer version that I should be upgrading to that does not > require an upgrade fee? If so, how do I get it? The latest released version is 7.24. Version 7.23 added some new features and 7.24 fixed some bugs. (There is also an undocumented preview of a 7.3 feature, optimizer goal setting, SET OPTIMIZATION FIRST_ROWS; to tell the optimizer to favor query paths which acquire the first rows of a result set as quickly as possible over the paths which reduce total cost of the query.) You would have to talk to your Informix Sales Rep. to determine if you can upgrade without cost. Art S. Kagel