Tuning Your Upgrade
Faster Upgrades Provide Many Benefits
Posted on 1/9/2007 (originally published in print on 1/1/2005)
by Mark Saucier
The PeopleSoft enterprise upgrade process can be a large effort for even the smallest of implementations that adhere to a "go vanilla" philosophy. Not only does PeopleSoft deliver a recipe with typically over 150 actions, but testing, training, environment management, and deployment are all important pieces to a successful upgrade. This article describes aspects of the delivered process that can be enhanced to greatly reduce the processing cycle time during an upgrade cutover. Some of the recommendations are general for any database platform, and some are specific to the Oracle platform.
Why Tune The Upgrade?
The biggest need for tuning an upgrade is to reduce the cycle time for the cutover process. You don't want to have to ask your users to get off the system for any period of time during the cutover to production. Being able to reduce the cutover cycle time can reduce or eliminate the amount of time needed during normal business hours that the system will be unavailable. In addition, reducing the cutover cycle time can save you money by reducing the number of hours spent doing test upgrades and the final upgrade. Reducing the cutover cycle time reduces risk, provides time for "comfort-level testing," and leaves more time for a fail-over window.
The cutover process is a subset of the overall upgrade process. Part of the process is one-time only, such as the Application Upgrade when all PeopleTools objects are brought up to the new tools release and customizations are reapplied. The cutover process consists of the following phases:
Phase I - Copy PeopleTools Tables and Upgrading PeopleTools
Phase II - Using SQL Alter and Create
Phase III - Converting Data
Phase IV - Cleaning Up
This cutover process is where we are focusing our tuning effort.
Consolidate DMS scripts into Export/Import
One of the first steps during the cutover process is to take the PeopleTools tables from your Upgrade environment and overlay them onto your target production environment using the MVPRDEXP.DMS and MVPRDIMP.DMS datamover scripts. The gist of this process is simply exporting the entire contents of all PeopleTools tables and replacing the existing tables in your target environment.
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