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Guidelines for Planning Your Siebel Database Upgrade

This topic provides an overview of the recommended guidelines for planning upgrade resources, estimating the upgrade timeline, and managing the data migration process.

Use the following steps to help plan your upgrade.

1. Determine your upgrade path. First, refer to Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Oracle Technology Network to determine supported upgrade paths for major releases.

   NOTE:  For Siebel CRM product releases 8.1.1.9 and later and for 8.2.2.2 and later, the system requirements and supported platform certifications are available from the Certification tab on My Oracle Support. For information about the Certification application, see article 1492194.1 (Article ID) on My Oracle Support.

   Verify whether you can upgrade directly to the currently shipping release or whether you must upgrade to a previous release first. Second, For more information about upgrade paths, see the applicable Siebel Maintenance Release Guide on My Oracle Support for the release to which you are upgrading. These Guides list the upgrade path from the major release to its most recent maintenance release. Maintenance releases roll up Fix Packs and also include new features. Because fixes to the upgrade process might exist in Fix Packs included in a maintenance release, you must install the most recent maintenance release before starting the upgrade.

2. Evaluate the complexity of the upgrade. Determine the complexity of the upgrade effort based on Oracle's Siebel modules implemented, number of integration points, number of interfaces, total number of scripts, and number of user interface scripts.
3. Assess the current Siebel environment and evaluate the existing implementation. Perform a detailed assessment of the current Siebel environment to determine how the implementation will be affected by the upgrade. Evaluate the current implementation in comparison with the architecture of the current release. The assessment will help you to identify areas where you can take advantage of new functionality to meet business requirements.
4. Estimate the level of effort to upgrade. Determine the metrics and cost associated with each aspect of the upgrade. Determine the effort required to upgrade based on the results of your complexity evaluation, current environment assessment, and new functionality review. This will help you to estimate resources, time line, and costs.
5. Establish the upgrade team. Assemble a cross-functional upgrade team that understands Siebel product architecture and performance guidelines. Include IT professionals, executives, and users to ensure a broad base of experience in technical, business, and Siebel-specific skills.
6. Review interface migration tasks. Determine the effort to migrate modified applets and views. This includes associating applets with Web template items and mapping them to Web template controls.
7. Plan for upgrade tuning. Tuning your production upgrade scripts can significantly reduce downtime during the final stages of your upgrade. Examples of upgrade tuning include eliminating SQL statements that do not affect any data, executing long-running SQL statements in parallel, and executing table creation, table rebuilds, and index creation in parallel.
8. Identify data migration tasks. After the upgrade, there might be data migration and repository configuration tasks that must be performed manually. These tasks frequently involve customizations made in prior releases.
9. Plan for end-user training. Analyze the impact of change on the users, and develop a plan for end-user training and adoption.

The upgrade of your application requires several key factors to be successful:

• A detailed understanding of customizations made to your current deployment
• Analysis and definition of the components within your enterprise
• Analysis of how to use new functionality provided by Oracle's Siebel software
• Strict adherence to industry best practices and guidelines identified in this guide

The upgrade planning process will produce a roadmap for the entire upgrade project that outlines infrastructure, deployment, and training requirements.

Use the results of this process to develop a project plan that identifies required skills and resources for developing and deploying the upgraded application. This will help you with advance budgeting of resources, time, and training.

Upgrade Planning Guidelines

Here are important guidelines to follow when planning an upgrade:

NOTE:  For Siebel CRM product releases 8.1.1.9 and later and for 8.2.2.2 and later, the system requirements and supported platform certifications are available from the Certification tab on My Oracle Support. For information about the Certification application, see article 1492194.1 (Article ID) on My Oracle Support.

• Review Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Oracle Technology Network, Siebel Release Notes on My Oracle Support. For more information about upgrade planning guidelines, see the applicable Siebel Maintenance Release Guide on My Oracle Support.
• Gather all relevant documentation that describes the current implementation, for example, requirements documents, design documents, and architecture context diagrams.
• Implement a change management program. For example, communicate rollout dates to users, schedule training, allow adequate time for users to adjust to the enhancements, and provide a process for end users to provide feedback to the project team.
• User adoption is critical to a successful upgrade. Provide access to a test environment that allows users to become familiar with the new version of the application, and provide end-user training on the upgraded application.

Database Planning Guidelines

Here are important guidelines to follow when planning the upgrade of your database:

• Analyze the impact of the upgrade on table customizations that you have made. Determine whether preupgrade data migration is required. Determine what postupgrade schema changes are required.
• Consider database layout in your planning. Plan to tune the database and database server for the upgrade, because settings and parameters for upgrade differ from those required for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP).
• If you are migrating multiple languages from a prior version, then plan extra time (one to two weeks) for the repository merge process. The expected merge time might increase with the number of languages in the repository. You also might need to plan for additional installation-related tasks.
• If your locale specific language values have changed over time, then you must make changes in the upglocale.<language code> file to trigger correct data migrations. For example, in a previous German language release, the German value Einzelperson mapped to the ENU value of Individual. In the new release Individuell and not Einzelperson maps to the ENU value Individual. Prior to running the upgrade utility, review the upglocale.language code files from your present release to that of the upgrade release, to validate, and verify your language strings and to make any necessary changes. Upglocale.language code files are located at
  /dbsrvr/language code/ folder in the new release's installation directory.
• For IBM DB2 platforms, consider increasing the size of your tablespaces before going live. Make sure that your custom tablespaces are large enough for upgraded tables. See Analyzing IBM DB2 Custom Tablespace Requirements for a Siebel Upgrade.

Production Database Upgrade Guidelines

Both the Prepare for Production step and the upgrade tuning process modify the SQL scripts used to perform the upgrade in the production test environment. In addition, it is common to further modify these scripts to meet local requirements.

The recommended way to perform the production upgrade is to use the SQL scripts that you have generated and modified for the production test upgrade. The steps in the production environment upgrade process are as follows:

• Run the Database Server Configuration Utilities in the production environment.
• In the Utilities, enter the information for the production environment instead of the production test environment. For example, you enter the ODBC connection for the production environment.

  This configures the driver file to run against the production database rather than the production test database. The utilities also configure the driver file to use the upgrade SQL files you generated for the production test upgrade.

• Run the Upgrade Wizard. The Upgrade Wizard uses the SQL files in the production test environment to upgrade the database in the production environment.

This approach has several advantages:

• You do not have to generate upgrade SQL files in the production environment and then manually transfer customizations to them from the production test environment.
• You do not lose any changes to the SQL files that were made by Siebel Upgrade Tuner in the production test environment.
• You do not have to run the Database Server Configuration Utilities in Prepare for Production mode again.
• With some exceptions, you do not have to perform database-related configuration tasks required Articles or Siebel Release Notes on My Oracle Support.

If your network configuration prevents creating an ODBC connection to your production database from inside your production test environment, and you cannot complete your production upgrade, then create a service request (SR) on My Oracle Support. Alternatively, you can phone Global Customer Support directly to create a service request or get a status update on your current SR. Support phone numbers remain the same and are listed on My Oracle Support.