Upgrade from Coexistent Xe to 8.11

We are a Coexistent Xe site and we are trying to ascertain the best upgrade path that we can take. We have been in talks with a consultancy that have suggested that we upgrade directly from Coexistent Xe to EnterpriseOne 8.11.

Is there anyone out there that has been through this kind of upgrade? can you give me some insight into what it actually involves, how successful this approach is and what problems we may encounter.

Our Installation:
OneWorld XE SP 23_B1 Update 4
World Cum 9 (Financials mostly)
Our Enterprise server is an iSeries

Many Thanks

Matthew,
We did a trial upgrade from Coexistent Xe to 8.11 this year. The 'end coexistence' instruction is one line in the upgrade manual. For us it will be about half of the effort of the upgrade. We have been running World since 1994, OW since 1998 and have mods and customizations all around the data base so this is no small thing. The end result is that we are in procrastination mode and have embarked on a series of clean up and consolidation projects instead of an upgrade. And there is no motivation as Xe is now supported until 2013. (horrible from my techie view). Tips I can give you are:
1. Engage Oracle Technical Support
2. R98403 is used to 'end coexistence'. The most inefficient process ever. It generates new tables based on the OW table specs and then copies through a Windows desktop from the old datasource (DDS coexistent file formats) to the new datasource (SQL OW only file formats). We have a 2 TB database and we figured it would take at least a month for us to run this so we will be finding another way to do this. Likely gen empty tables and use iSeries utilities to copy the data. Try R98403 once to see what happens.
3. You will also find all kinds of issues with your data. There are a lot of missing unique constraints. Your data will not conform to the OW unique index definition. Watch the logs from R98403 as that is the only indication.
4. There are utilities for this provided to customers going from World to 8.11. I have asked them to get this info out to coexistent customers too. See Solution ID 200953735. We are in the process of installing a World PTF to use these tools. Beware though - they find data problems by trying to generate unique indexes across your data base. Make sure you know what you are doing before you attempt this.
5. Once you finish ending coexistence, you will have a beautiful tidy data base in which to START your OneWorld upgrade. Going from Xe to 8.11 is in fact going from Xe to 8.9, from 8.9 to 8.10, from 8.10 to 8.11. In other words if there is a table conversion for a given table for each of those jumps you will see three table conversions in the upgrade plan for a table. Time will be an issue. Again - we have about 400 million records in our F0911 so this would be a problem for us. We will be talking to Oracle about a) combining the TCs and b) coming up with an incremental plan - ie convert 90% of the data beforehand and then the remaining 10% on the upgrade weekend where we have a maximum of 48 hours to be out.

Hopefully I haven't terrified you too much. We run all JDE modules and have modified and customized everything which is why this is so complicated for us. I would be happy to discuss this further with you because it would be good information for us to know how another coexistent customer does with this sort of upgrade.

Sue Shaw
Xe Coexistent SP23J1 iSeries V5R3
[email protected]

Matthew,

We had done something similar to what you are about to embark on (although we went to 8.10 instead of 8.11). The ending co-existance was a big deal. Especially if you have 3rd party interfaces. The file member names change from the world format (ex. i0101) to the Xe member name (ex F0101), to the 8.11 member name (ex F010100001). This was a big task to prep the for. I had to give my programmers two test environments - one for ending co-extistance and one for 8.11. We did this because we could not afford the downtime to convert everything from CoEx to 8.10 in one weekend. So we broke it out into 2 weekends.

If you can afford the downtime and make the jump from Co-existance to 8.11, that will be the best - but you certainly do learn a lot about your architect and the data doing both upgrades.

The biggest things that I would suggest that you look at area:

duplicate data - World did not have primary keys on a lot of the files - giving you duplicate data when converted to meet OW indexes.

Menus - Xe allowed you to use OneWorld Explorer - 8.11 uses Solution Explorer - we used custom menus up the whazoo - these had to be converted or recreated

Security - this was another big change for us.

You get past those three hurdles and there should be no reason to stall. Unless you're worried about finance closing the books (year end) on a new system, the holidays are always a great time to upgrade.

Just my 2-cents though

FYI..........

You can restore your file member names back to the 'Xe' format by copying the entire datasource using the R98403......yes not very elegant but functional.

We have ended our co-existance last month and Kristian gave a nice overview of what hurdles you'll have to take. Manual interventions in World tables will be needed quite often, time is a big issue...
If you are using AS400:
We also had alot of trouble with record locks. After Oracle looked into it, this was caused by Lazy close. This should be turned off!!! It will prevent you a lot of grief

Now transforming data to unicode...

The best path is to end Coexistence, then do the upgrade. When we converted our DV7333 Coex/Xe to straight Xe it took about 4.5 hours for the R98403 to complete so we could end coexistence easily in a day.

We had issues with duplicates in the following tables. Most we manually cleaned up. With the F43199 we used the World Y2 migration utility used for direct migration from World to 8.x

F1307,F43199,F0618,F0101A,F4209,F4111,F43121,F06116,F06904,F1212,F4009T,F4104,F4141,F4301,F4801.

Grant

I am actually on a coexistence -> 8.11SP1 Direct migration right now and I don't really see any reason why you should end coexistence first. In my opinion it would simply be one more thing to do. Plus the conversion programs in the Y2 PTF are much more elegant than using the R98403 plus XE migration programs.

This same method will be employed at my next engagement which is also coexistence to 8.11 and Oracle will be performing the upgrade / data conversions in that instance using the Y2 PTF as it is also their recommendation to perform the migration this way.

I would agree with some of the other posters that Duplicate Key Field Records are the primary issue that you will face during your conversions.

I personally also ran into issue with the TC's due to older Planner ESU / Tools Releases which I believe have been resolved since I implemented. I will let you know how it goes next month when I start my next implementation.

Shawn, we also ran into the problems with TC due to old Planner ESU/Tools release... I remember after reading your post so you are not alone