IDS Forum

Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans

Posted By: Andreas Legner1
Date: Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 4:40 p.m.

In Response To: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans (MARK COLLINS)

AFAIK version 10 eliminated the need for eliminating outstanding in-place
alters.

If I recall correctly, the problem was not (never was) the upgrade, but a
possible later reversion. Since that v10 change pre-existing outstanding
IPAs, from before an upgrade, would not hinder a later reversion.
Different story, though, for new IPAs (new ALTER TABLEs) introduced after
upgrade.

In case you just want to be in the know wrt. outstanding IPAs, I'd
recommend
https://github.com/domusonline/InformixScripts/tree/master/queries

HTH,
Andreas

From: "MARK COLLINS" <markc@myfastmail.com>
To: ids@iiug.org
Date: 11/29/2017 03:57 PM
Subject: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans [40294]
Sent by: ids-bounces@iiug.org

IDS 11.50.FC6
HP-UX 11.31 PA-RISC

As you can see above, we're on 11.50, and needing to upgrade before
end-of-life. Because we're on PA-RISC, we can only upgrade to 11.70.

Looking at the Migration manual, it states that best practice calls for
removing any outstanding in-place alters prior to upgrading. The manual
includes a link to a support article
(http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21144602) that details
how
to identify outstanding in-place alters via the 'oncheck -pT' command,
looking
at the Home Data Page Version Summary of that output.

The support article above includes a link to another support article
(http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=swg21160923) that
includes
a shell script, inplacealter.sh, that is supposed to automate this process.

The article includes a disclaimer that the script is not supported by
Informix
Technical Support.

I have downloaded the script and tried to run it, but it has problems. For
instance, I found at least three places in the script where it referenced a

shell variable by name, but without the leading '$'. For instance, there
was a
while statement:

while [ startbytes -lt numbytes ]

instead of

while [ $startbytes -lt $numbytes ]

After making changes to add the '$' to the places that I spotted, I ran the

script against a single table. It tells me that there are outstanding
in-place
alters, even though the manual method detailed in the first support article

tells me that there are no outstanding alters, as all pages are shown as
the
'(current)' version.

Even more, the script gives me an UPDATE statement to run to fix these
in-place alters. I run the UPDATE, then re-run the script, and get the same

results.

Further, there seems to be an issue with the section that sets the shell
variable 'count' (line 212). Sometimes, the variable ends up with an empty
value, which causes problems a few lines later when it tries to pipe a
command
to the dc command, and also when it does

let sum=$sum+$count

So, my question (finally) is - does anyone have a debugged version of this
script that they can share? Or an alternate automated method of identifying

tables with in-place alters?

Or is the documentation overstating the necessity of clearing the
outstanding
in-place alters?

Thanks in advance.

*******************************************************************************

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Messages In This Thread

• In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
  MARK COLLINS -- Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 9:56 a.m.
  • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
    Andreas Legner1 -- Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 4:40 p.m.
    • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
      MARK COLLINS -- Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 5:16 p.m.
    • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
      Fernando Nunes -- Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 5:24 p.m.
      • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
        Fernando Nunes -- Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 5:30 p.m.
        • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
          david@smooth1.co.uk -- Wednesday, 29 November 2017, at 5:44 p.m.
        • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
          MARK COLLINS -- Thursday, 30 November 2017, at 10:28 a.m.
          • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
            Fernando Nunes -- Friday, 1 December 2017, at 2:02 p.m.
      • Re: In Place Alters and Upgrade plans
        MARK COLLINS -- Thursday, 30 November 2017, at 10:36 a.m.

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