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Tuning the Production Upgrade Scripts

Tuning can significantly reduce overall downtime during your Siebel 7 production upgrade. Examples of upgrade tuning include elimination of SQL statements that do not affect any data, parallelization of the most expensive SQL statements, and parallelization of table creation, table rebuilds, and index creation.

The upgrade scripts provided by Siebel are generic in nature and migrate the entire application functionality to the upgraded Siebel version given an upgrade path, database platform, and language. In the three cases described below, tuning can help optimize the production upgrade scripts and minimize down time.

• Most customers use only a part of the customized application functionality, resulting in populating only some of the base tables. Therefore, it is possible to contain the scripts to upgrade only the desired application functionality.
• Upgrade scripts delivered with this release may contain SQL statements that run against the tables whether or not they contain any data. Such SQL executions may be redundant for a production upgrade.
• You cannot determine the most expensive schema creation and manipulation statements without analyzing the customizations and nature of application data. If you identify schema creation and manipulation statements that take the longest time to run, you can execute them in parallel to decrease the total time for the production upgrade.

Understanding the Effort to Tune

The purpose of tuning the production upgrade scripts is to minimize application downtime, thereby reducing the impact to your brand or image, loss of productivity, and potential loss of revenue. Plan your resources and test environment for tuning the upgrade scripts before you perform a production upgrade to Siebel 7.

The following factors, in order of importance, affect the tuning effort:

• Acceptable downtime for your production upgrade
• Extent of customizations at the data layer
• How much application functionality is used
• Number of remote, connected or Web client end users
• Database size and platform
• Siebel version from which you are upgrading

While tuning the production upgrade scripts is the key to minimizing downtime, this process requires thorough understanding of upgrade scripts, extreme caution, and a trained approach.

Tuning the upgrade scripts can only be performed by Siebel Expert Services or Global Competency, who are provided with the necessary documentation, training, and support by engineering. Contact Siebel Expert Services or Global Competency to get an estimate of your tuning effort. Resource estimation should also account for a test environment that contains production data for tuning of the upgrade scripts.