Hi,

What do other customers do regarding installing service packs

The installation is very slow.
In the past few months , we moved from B2 to C4, starting off on SP6.
Now, we required to change because of all the issues we encountered.
But I have discovered to my horror , the pain involved in installing Service Packs on our development system.
Maybe it was my innocence, but did not expect to encounter these issues.

SP7 took nearly a day between scanning and installing, likewise SP8. This is still incomplete because we ran into Porting set issues.

I have yet to start the Create to runtime, so I am not too sure how long this will take.

IS there estimates from Baan on the length of time this procedure should take.

We are using Oracle for all companies, I have heard of other companies moving their 000 to tbase to speed up this process

Aidan:(

If you install the SP's first on a test environment you could turn off the option 'save components' which will save you a lot of time. Further more I have experienced that an installation on a C/S environment takes up to 500 % more time to install. To speed things up I set the parameters ORA_MAX_ARRAY_FETCH, ORA_MAX_ARRAY_INSERT and RDS_FULL to high values. I have turned on once some debugging parameters and noticed that the installation process does a lot of reading/writing to the pmc tables.

On a NT Oracle C/S environment we needed up to 5 hours to install up to 1000 solutions. In a NT Oracle full host configuration about an hour.

Conclusion: because you want to have a backup first you need to to do that during the weekend.

Aidan,

Any consultant able to predict the installation time of Service Packs would make a fortune. Usually we're talking days here, depending on the power of your hardware. The only thing you can more or less estimate is the creation of runtime data dictionaries

What Han said about Client/Server setup is correct. If is is anyway possible get your application and database running on the same machine and use a direct local connection, e.g. by disabling the Oracle TWO_TASK or ORACLE_SERVICE_NAME variables. To get Baan running on your DB server you could either run it there (in a cluster scenario) or run the SP installation from a small Baan Workstation setup on the the DB server.

I am not sure about disabling the Save Objects option. Doesn't that mean that the SP cannot be deinstalled anymore? Even with a full backup you might want to retain the option of rolling back the patch installations.

Regarding the remark about tbase: I would not do it as you would sacrifice reliability and recoverability for some speed gain.

Reluctantly, I admit we a far behind on service packs. We currently sit at B4c4 SP3. I have been placed in charge of putting together a project of applying all the service packs, and repairing the customizations. Fortunately, our number of customizations is low. At my disposal I have an EMC Symmetrix that I can take instant copies of Baan and my Oracle database. I am planning on taking a snap shot of production and applying the service packs, so that I can predict exactly what will happen in production.

Should I apply them all at once, one after another? I think it probably would be the easiest instead of applying one, fixing the customizations, applying the next and fixing, etc...

A rough guess how long it will take to apply the packs? I'm using a Sun E4500 with 10 cpu's and 10GB ram.

Thanks,
Tom

Tom,

Giving your HW configuration and low customization level, I would plan to install all the SP's in one go and upgrade your customizations from SP3 to SP7/8(?). The only thing you should not skip is to run CRDD (Create Runtime Data Dictionaries) in between the Service Packs.

Mmm, you have some formidable hardware, a 10-CPU Sun should do the trick alot faster than any of the stuff we have. Nevertheless, it remains a lottery to predict the installations times: my guess would be between 1-4hrs per Service Pack?

Hi Patrick,

The method we used to go from SP6 to Sp8
only included a Create Runtime Data Dictionaries at the very end.
I am interested why you say that this should be done at each stage as I was advised otherwise.

It has been done on our test server and everything seemed to okay.

The biggest problem we have is that we don't have the hardware,
symmetrical EMC boxes would be dreamland in our case. What a brilliant way to do business, truly frightening. We are still in the stone age.

Customisations are the real curse, we have about 50 to modify which is project that will take a few weeks

Aidan

Aidan,

The reason why I would recommend to do a CRDD (Create Runtime Data Dictionaries) between SP upgrades is to realign your base between application and runtime information. I can see the impact on application related objects less severe - and possibly that is why other folks could have advised you to skip that step - but I would deem a CRDD for Tools absolutely vital after a SP upgrade. The next SP might be depending on new/changed functionality in your Tools base which you would not have correctly propogated to your runtime environment yet if you do not perform the CRDD in between.

I remember that between SPs 5 and 6 (or 4 and 5?), you had several corrections to your PMC tables, where you had to run several correction programs to avoid future problems. Other thing was a performance increase during future Service Packs by improvements done to the patch installation procedure!

Not only a CRTDD needs to be run, but also the other actions related to pos-installation need to be done if you want to have everything running ok afterwards.

Make sure that you always read the installation manuals and check the latest information solutions regarding each Service Pack! This will avoid several future problems.

Is there a session in Baan that allows you to print out what objects can be found in our B40O and B40C vrc's.

I also want to upgrade our current SP5 level to SP8. So I need to see what customisations have been made which will allow me to develop an all-encompassing test plan.

Can anybody give me some guidelines on what needs testing after a SP upgrade?

It must be almost impossible to check every single piece of functionality in Baan and testing should concentrate on key functions. For this reason it would be interesting to know how other people go about testing.

Thanks

PJ

You can use the session Compare Package VRC's (ttadv6450m000) located in Tools -> Application Customization/Development -> Utilities.

As the help of the session mentions,

"To print differences between two VRCs of a package and/or two languages. The differences can be printed in detail, if required.
This session can be very usefull to evaluate the consequences of changes in standard software for customized software.
..."

You can also do it the "hard" way and look at the RTDD files :D

I recently installed 4c4 and all 8 service packs. The time it takes also depends on how many update VRC's you have. I went through all the create runtime stuff between SP's. In SP6 there were PMC improvements, so SP7 & SP8 went quicker. Also, in SP8 Baan has put all the tools updates into a seperate dump.
I was told that I did not have to worry about the correction problems in SP5 (I think it was 5), because I never installed any individual solutions between service packs.

I wish that I had tried to set my production company before starting the SP installations because right now 4c4 is performing very poorly and I don't know how it would have performed before all the SP's. I feel like it is a porting set issue. Our much slower Tru64 Unix Alpha box with 4c2 and Oracle 7.3.4 runs MRP about 8 to 10 times faster then the new twice as fast Alpha box with 4c4 and Oracle 8.1.7.

I took me about 3 weeks to install Baan and all the Supply Chain stuff and 8 Service Packs and who knows how long it will take to get it right.

One other note, there are Excel Docs in the release notes on the Service Pack CD's listing the sessions being patched.

We are at SP7 plus selected solution installs on Baan 5.0b and have decided to upgrade to SP11 + recent weekly dumps since we are about a year behind and more frequently run into solutions installs requiring hundreds of pre-reqs and many customization merges.

We installed SP8/9/10/11 plus 13 weekly dumps (total about 5000 solutions) on our system test machine. It took 10 mins to scan the 7 patch files (we also use bci1). We have alrteady scanned in all weekly dumps. It took one hour to Chk to Install the patches (only SP11 since it brings in all the rest). We use the output from this run (13Mb) passing through several Unix filters to determine which customizations are affected; we have about 270 scripts/forms/reports/etc. It took almost 6.5 hours to Install the Patches (again, SP11 only). It took 2 hours to Chk to Install the remaining weekly dump individual solutions. Again, we use the output from this run to check customizations. The final Install of weekly dumps took 1.5 hours. The Create RTDD for Tools took 10 mins. The Create RTDD for pacc b50sp1 and our own production pacc was 1.5 hours. Patch objects after error solving took 1 min. Create tables (one pacc) took 1.5 hours for all pkgs.

Customization merging of program and report scripts will be done as a team using a customized session in Baan that calls a superb GUI comparison tool called Compare It! from www.grigsoft.com. This product was chosen because of its functionality, speed and ease of developing an interface with Baan. New development and production support will be slowed during the merge process.

We will be installing the SP's on our development domain in a separate update VRC (B50T_b_stnd instead of B50U_b_stnd). We will have to go through the same process as outlined above including the Chk to Install since time and customizations have evolved. The Tools components will affect both VRC trees but the testing we have done indicates that the SP upgrade did not negatively impact Tools. We will develop all customization merge code in a development VRC in the separate tree and then migrate to to the "normal" tree.

We will ultimately have to migrate this process forward (except for the Chk to Install's) to a test domain, a training domain and the production cluster. Testing is the big job on something like this. We are considering this upgrade to be a new Release just like our provious releases of new functionality or geographic areas with all the associated regression testing. As we move forward our production support platforms disappear since the customization are not (now) the same as those on the production platform.

We are using a SUN E10000 with multiple CPU's and mutliple domains (partitions).