IDS upgrade - Best Practices

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The following is a list of additional suggestions to help avoid potential problem areas during the upgrade process. For details on each step refer to Informix documentation.

• Enable Conversion Guard on the target server, if available in your version of IDS.
• Drop sysmaster to avoid sysmaster conversion issues.
• Prevent the scheduler from starting. This prevents potential internal scheduler connection issues.
• Ensure the availability of free disk space to accommodate the upgrade.

(Recommended 20% free for each DBSPACE if feasible). Migration Guide recommend that the root chunk should contain at least ten percent free space when converting to Dynamic Server Version 11.50. For a successful conversion of each database, ensure that 2000 KB of free space per database is available in each dbspace.
• Drop onpload databases. If you need to keep the onpload database, consider setting the environment variable DBONPLOAD to the name of the onpload database if the name is not the default name
• Disable continuous logical log backups.
• If the ALARMPROGRAM configuration parameter is set to the script alarmprogram.sh, you must set the value of BACKUPLOGS in alarmprogram.sh to N.
• Disable any monitoring software for the database server.
• Disable all informix cron jobs.
• Shut down the source database server (onmode –yuck).
• Use a copy of Version 11.50 onconfig.std to populate its parameters. Not an old or existing version of the onconfig file.
• Confirm the SHMBASE configuration parameter settings is what required for the target version. It should match the value in the target version release notes and the target version onconfig.std setting.
• Test your setup using a dummy instance of the new version. Ensure that a temporary devices are used, avoiding existing or used rootchunk. This will ensure that issues pertaining to KAIO, memory, TCP settings etc are addressed prior to upgrade.