Falling back from 12.5 to 11.03 in mininum time

[autopdf]

we are moving to sybase 12.5 from the 11.03 version that we currently have.

it seems that in case of a fallback, we cannot simply load the 12.5 database on teh 11.03 server. Nor can we run the 12.5 transaction logs against the 11.03 database.

The only other alternative seems to be bcping out and bcping in the tables (too time consuming for the database of our kind), or replication server (too expensive)

does anyone have any experience with this? (i.e. 11.03 to 12.5 migration)

thanks -

 

[sybaseguru]

Hi,

In Sybase you cannot load a database from newer version to older version. For example from 12.5 to 11.0.3 etc

There are many upgrade strategies involved:

1) Upgrade production server over a week-end to 12.5
2) Create an ASE 12.5 server alongside your current production server, sync logins, dump and load the databases at a cut over time and hope that all goes OK
3) Are you going to upgrade to 12.5 32-bit or 64-bit? If you have a powerful host with more than 6GB of RAM 64-bit is your best option as you can have unlimited memory
4) If this is a production server then most probably you have a rep server somewhere. You can use that to replicated between 11.0.3 and 12.5. You may negotiate with Sybase a lower price for this purpose.


The best strategy as I have done many times is to create a 12.5 server on a dev box and do a nightly dump and load from prod to that 12.5 server and test your application against 12.5 for at least 3 weeks to ensure that all is OK. Make sure that you run your batch jobs and ensure that all is Ok and figures tally. Also be aware of optimiser behaviour changes between 11.0.3 and 12.5. If you have an isse I will tell you how to solve it. Anyway have a look at my suggestions and decide which one to go for.

Hope this helps