Planning the upgrade

The upgrade process is designed to meet the needs of multiple types of environment. Depending on the setup within your organization, a number of deployment options are available to minimize the impact on day-to-day operations.

Before you upgrade iBase, consider the following areas:

Original system configuration and use

Every iBase deployment is configured to match the needs of different users, so it is important that you recognize which features are used, and ensure they are configured correctly after the upgrade.

Requirements of the system after the upgrade

Perform an analysis of the new features of iBase to ensure that all the features relevant to your organization are set up correctly.

Client location

The installation process will differ depending on the number of users and the method of connection used by iBase clients when connecting to the server. For deployments in organizations that only use locally hosted databases and clients, the upgrade can take place in a single phase.

For deployments in organizations that include remote users, large numbers of clients, or who share data with other agencies, planning the upgrade can be challenging. Most iBase releases from 9.0.5 up to 9.2.1 made no changes to the underlying database schema, so a new client version could be rolled out in phases. However, this approach is still problematic and can result in compatibility issues between versions used together on a single database.

In other versions, including 9.0.0, 10.1.0 and later, iBase needs to perform a database upgrade. This means, for example, an iBase 10.1.0 client cannot access an earlier database until it has been upgraded, and clients on earlier versions cannot access the database after it has been upgraded. If all clients are not upgraded at the same time, users on earlier versions lose access. This means a phased approach is not possible.

Depending on the number of client machines involved, you can carry out deployment of the iBase clients manually, or schedule it for automatic deployment using enterprise systems management software.

Timescale for deployment

Creating a realistic timescale for deployment allows you to plan the deployment around the peak times of your system use.