Upgrade 8 to 9

[Keith Owens]

Hello all

We are currently on V8.3E and are in the process of planning to upgrade to 9.

We're on HP kit using HPUX11

Does 9 come with a conv89 utility? I know a dump & load is probably the recommended way but conv89 may be useful when we test the install

Is a dump & reload very different in V9. I know I can rebuild indexes at same time as loading - otherwise is it all the same? can I use same scripts for binary dump & load?

About storage areas - does this give me the ability to identify very dynamic tables and have them in their own area so that I can idxbuild small parts of the db very quickly & very often if I need to.

If you have any scare stories for me to benefit from then I'd be grateful to hear of your experiences.

Thanks folks
Keith
DBA under stress

 

[ron]

Hello, Keith.

We went from 8.3E to 9.1D05 in May 2003. It was then a 100GB database on a Solaris box (now 170GB).

On 8.3E we had good scripts to make the dump/load process faily painless - and the move to 9.1 was quite smooth. We did consider the conv89 option, but decided to convert by dump/load. I am happy that that was a good decision ... nice and clean and gives you the opportunity to allocate tables and indexes to appropriate Storage Areas. If you decide to take the dump/load route -- note that you have to do a big edit job on the schema to specify the Storage Areas for each table and index.

Note that when you move to 9.1 - your DB will immediately grow by around about 10% ... because each block header and record header contains "more stuff".

Storage Areas don't give you any performance advantage per se. They give you much better ability to organise and maintain the DB. Yes, as you say, you can put dynamic tables in a particular Area so that you can reorganise (D+L) just that Area more frequently than other parts of the DB.

From my point of view, conversion from 8.3 to 9.1 is not hard -- but I urge you to do a test run first on a small DB ... and then a dress rehearsal on your production DB (if that is at all possible).

Good luck!
Ron.