Planning to migrate databases

Before you migrate to IBM® Business Automation Workflow V19.0.0.3, consider the databases and schemas that you want to create and the ones that you want to reuse.

Before upgrading your production databases during migration, it is a good idea to clone the databases and use the cloned databases to test the database upgrade. This test method prevents your production databases from being corrupted and you can start your source environment again if required. You can keep your source environment running and do the migration testing in parallel using the cloned databases, as long as you make sure that your test environment is isolated from the production environment.
Important: To avoid conflict with your production environment:
  • Make sure that your test environment is isolated from the production environment. Make sure that the two environments do not use the same Workflow Center.
  • While you are using the cloned database, do not deploy new applications or update existing applications on your test or production environments.

After you finish testing migration, configure a new deployment environment that you intend to use as the target production environment. You can clone the latest version of the production database to keep the database data up-to-date, or you can switch your new target deployment environment to point to the source production database when you run the migration.

If the database version of your source environment is not supported by Business Automation Workflow V19.0.0.3, decide to either upgrade your databases or clone your databases and use the more recent version. If you clone the databases, you can install a database software version that is supported by V19.0.0.3, export the source databases, and then load them into the new database installation. Then, you can use the cloned databases to do the database upgrade and use the cloned databases as the target databases.
Tip: You can only clone and copy to the same kind of database. For example, you can clone a DB2 database and copy to another DB2 database, but you cannot clone a DB2 database and copy to an Oracle database.
Business Automation Workflow components store timestamps in the following two ways:
  • Normalized in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
  • Based on the local time zone
How time zones are handled in Business Process Choreographer explains in more detail. When you copy an existing database, make sure that both the new Business Automation Workflow server and the database server are configured for the same time zone as the existing Business Automation Workflow.

For information about the minimum number of databases required, see Planning the number of databases. If you are planning a single deployment environment, you can reuse the previous common database for both cell-scoped and deployment-environment-scoped data. If you plan to have multiple deployment environments after migration, one of the new deployments environments can reuse the common database but you must create a new deployment-environment-scoped database for each extra deployment environment.

When you migrate to V19.0.0.3, you can reuse existing schemas or choose to create new ones. You might want to create a new schema for the messaging engine database because there is only one messaging engine bus in V19.0.0.3. Also, remember that the Workflow Server and Performance Data Warehouse tables must use different schemas.

In the following example, the organization had six schemas in IBM Business Process Manager. They kept the same databases and schemas when migrating and added only one new schema, for the messaging tables.
Table 1. Example of migrating database schemas from IBM Business Process Manager V7.5.1 to Business Automation Workflow V19.0.0.3
Database capability V7.5.1 schema V8.5 schema
CellScopedDB   T3CELL
CommonDB T3CELL T3CELL
ProcessServer T3S1PS T3S1PS
PDW T3S1PDW T3S1PDW
BSpace T3SR01 T3SR01
BPC T3SR01 T3SR01
Messaging T3S1C T3S1ME

More information about migrating databases is shown in the sample migration topologies topics.