Clarity

Hi all,

recently our physical database server reached EOL so we have built a like-for-like replacement and configured it mostly the same. The drives and folders are set up as before and we have taken a copy of the existing database and restored it on the new server. My question is this: In terms of testing, before we do the final cut-over to the new server, would the below steps be reasonable to undertake?

1. Take one of the existing Prod application servers out of our webfarm temporarily (or we could maybe even point one of our test app servers at it)

2. Update the properties.xml file of the app server reflect the change of database, passwords etc.

3. Run admin general upload-config to test the app server - db connection.

4. Restart all services on the app server

5. Access the individual app server's tomcat instance to begin testing.

Are there any other aspects we should consider?

admin general upload is not required if you are using tomcat

So I feel I bit guilty for not chiming in here with a ling list of things that could be tested.... but to be honest whenever I've done anything "drastic" like this (re-platforming part of the stack), it tends to boil down to "start up the application, does it work? All good then.". i.e. its kinda binary ; works/doesn't work.

Hi Colin,

After database refresh, it's recommended to run the following commands, prior to your tests. They should be run on Clarity PPM server, when it's already linked to your database. Run them one by one, in the following order:
admin db compile
admin db analyze

The first one will recompile the database objects, the second will recalculate the statistics. Both will improve the performance on your newly restored database.

Hope this helps

Kind Regards
Nika Hadzhikidi

Thank you Nika!

We have been testing our Sandbox environment since the refresh and it does seem quite slow. We were expecting this however as the app server is actually a VM based here in Ireland while the new database server is based in New Jersey. We'll give the commands a go to see if there is any improvement.

Thanks again.

You'd get better performance if you could run your app/VM in New Jersey too (even if all the users of the VM were in Ireland). Get the app as 'close' as possible to the database!

Those 'admin' commands are just doing a compile of invalid objects (which shouldn't really be needed as you app would probably be broken if anything was invalid) and an analyse statistics which is usually good database maintenance practice  - the latter might make the DB run better, but if the DB is a copy of an already "analysed" database I wouldn't hold out too much hope on that!

(but for a "sandbox" perhaps all this doesn't really matter of course )

Hi Dave,

yes our actual Production database is also based in New Jersey.

We only used the Sandbox app server (based here) to test if we could at least connect to it. Basically we were trying to understand any issues/problems we might encounter prior to doing our Production cutover to the new database server. It all looks to be fine though. We just needed to update the properties.xml file to point at the new server and that was it basically.