test IDS upgrade without biting the bullet?

[sumgirl]

Hi all. I am running IDS 9.21 on an AIX machine and want to test an upgrade to IDS 9.4. Is there a way I can go back and forth easily between the two versions? I dont have two machines and I cant just bite the bullet and upgrade without some testing...whats the easiset way to do this?

Someone told me I could make a copy of my Informix directory say to Informix_a and then do my upgrade to the original Informix directory. Then test and to revert back just rename the upgraded version of the Informix directory to say Informix_b and rename Informix_a back to informix!

It cant be that easy can it? If thats way offbase, I would be happy to here any and all strategies (AIX/Unix specific) except the ones that advise me to get a second system for testing!

 

[Mattmx98]

I use a different directory for each version of informix...

/usr/local/IDS_9.21.FC4-1
/usr/local/IDS_9.40.FC3-1

then I simply use a symbolic link to switch versions.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root system 26 Jan 25 16:34 informix -> /usr/local/IDS_9.40.FC3-1/

this also perserves all the config files for each version if there are differences...sqlhosts, onconfigs...etc.

I have been using different instances for each version so be careful not to overwrite the dbspaces/chunks of the old instance if you plan to go back and forth, i haven't experimented with this part yet so not sure if it works well or not. I'm only a couple days into my initial testing of the upgrade process so far

gluck