Regeneration at upgrade

We at ChemAxon are turning attention at the possible inconvenience of table regeneration at JChem version upgrade.





We are interested in


- how big a problem this represents for your company


- how are you dealing with the issue at the present (e.g. performing the upgrade at weekends, creating copies of tables, etc.)





(we also appreciate comments in e-mail if you feel your practices are confidential)





Szilard

Hi,





we recently performed an upgrade from 3.0.9 to 3.1.5. The inconvinients we found were:





- Need to "stop" production system for some hours.


- Need to create copies of tables and related structures for different versions of Jchem, and afterwards rename them.


- Depending on how the Oracle database is configured or tunned, this upgrade can take from minutes to hours, or even days.


- Need to know Oracle in-depth.


- JCMan is not really user-friendly (I know this is fixed in newer versions)





If you need further details, please contact me.





Thanks.

Hi,





Thank you for your feedback.


(other feedbacks are still welcome from others).

Quote:

- Need to create copies of tables and related structures for different versions of Jchem, and afterwards rename them. - Depending on how the Oracle database is configured or tunned, this upgrade can take from minutes to hours, or even days. - Need to know Oracle in-depth.

I suppose the latter two are mostly related to creating copies of tables.


Did you copy the tables for "extra safety", or rather to reduce downtime ?





We are thinking of ways to speed up transition by allowing precalculation of new data while the old system is still running (e.g. storing them in a LOB column). At the actual regeneration most of the data would already be there, only rows that were inserted / modified after precalculation should be computed at the actual transition.


This could significantly reduce downtime of a normal regeneration (when you do not copy tables), though would not eliminate it entirely.


How does it sound ?


Would it help your situation ?

Quote:

- JCMan is not really user-friendly (I know this is fixed in newer versions)

Could you be more specific about this ?


What were the major problems with user-friendliness ?





Best regards,





Szilard