Will Higher version dump work with lower version of progress

[casorohi]

Hello everyone need your advice on dump and load of two diff progress versions.

We have two version of progress on one machine I.e 9.1d and 102b06. Next few days the dump and load is scheduled to improve the performance for v9 db.

1. Will this work if I convert version 9 db to version 10 to get the benefit of multithreaded binary dump and then load those binary dump files in version 9 db ?

2. Is version 9 .r files/application code will work if we upgrade the db to version 10 ? Matter of fact for some .p files are missing we have only .r files?..

Thanks

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I believe the design goal is that dump files are forward-compatible across major versions, so I believe it should work to go backwards as well given that it's v9 data. You may want to inquire with Progress TS about that to get the official word, or maybe someone here has a more informed opinion. Particularly when you're dealing with old releases, what should work in theory isn't always the same as what does work in practice.

Regarding r-code, it is not portable across major versions. The compiler version number is built into the .r file and it changes between major releases. You would have to recompile from source to create v10 r-code if you intend to run this application on v10. However if you do decide to upgrade, D&L, and recompile, it would make more sense at this point to move to v11. 10.2B is already a mature release and according to the Progress web site it's on its last service pack. That's not the best foundation for the future of your application.

Regarding the missing code, your options may be rewrite it or try to have someone decompile it to get you the source (if you trust that).

 

[RealHeavyDude]

If I remember correctly there were some problems with the binary dump/load around V9.1d with version compability. Nevertheless, I would not bet much on your approach working as in OE10 there have been several changes made to the meta schema and additional data types that were introduced. I have no idea what effect that has on the binary dump and if there any that would prevent loading a binary dump file from OE10 into a V9 datababase. I completely agree with Rob that you should contact Progress Tech Support.

Nevertheless, even if there would be no major release difference between the source and the target I would thoroughly test any dump and load approach. There are always things that can go wrong like not having enough disk space for the index rebuild or a file system being much slower than you aticipated ...

In any case, before you attempt this you must make a backup of your database in V9 to be able to fall back to it whenever something goes wrong.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.