Upgrade Guide for DB2 UDB for z/OS and OS/390 > Database and UI Upgrade Planning >

Best Practices for Doing Your Upgrade

Upgrades: All upgrades.

Environments: All environments.

This section provides an overview of best practices for planning upgrade resources, estimating the upgrade time line, and managing the data migration process.

Use the following steps to help plan your upgrade.

1. Evaluate the complexity of the upgrade. Determine the complexity of the upgrade effort based on Siebel modules implemented, number of integration points, number of interfaces, total number of scripts, and number of user interface scripts.
2. 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 Siebel Systems functionality to meet business requirements.
3. 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.
4. Establish the upgrade team. Assemble a cross-functional upgrade team that understands Siebel architecture and performance best practices. Include IT professionals, executives, and users to ensure a broad base of experience in technical, business, and Siebel-specific skills.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Identify data migration tasks. After the upgrade, there may be data migration and repository configuration tasks that must be performed manually. These tasks frequently involve customizations made in prior releases.
8. 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 Siebel application requires several key things 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 Siebel software
• Strict adherence to industry best practices and best practices identified in this guide

The upgrade planning process will produce a road map 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 Best Practices

Here are important best practices to follow when planning an upgrade:

• Review System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb, Release Notes, Maintenance Release Guide, and Siebel Alerts related to upgrades to verify your upgrade path. These documents are available on Siebel SupportWeb at http://ebusiness.siebel.com/supportweb/.
• Gather all relevant documentation that describes the current implementation, for example requirements documents, design documents, and architecture context diagrams.
• Do not start a new development effort until after the new version has been rolled out. This is especially important when you are upgrading from Release 6.x to Release 7.7. There are significant user interface differences between the two versions, and you must change existing functionality before moving on to customized functionality.
• 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 Best Practices

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

• Analyze the impact of the upgrade on table customizations that you have made. Determine if preupgrade data migration is required. Determine what postupgrade schema changes are required. For a list of tables that are affected by the upgrade, see Schema Changes.
• Consider database layout in your planning. Plan to tune the database and Siebel Database Server for the upgrade, because settings and parameters for upgrade differ from those required for OLTP.
• If you are migrating multiple languages from a prior version, plan extra time (one to two weeks) for the repository merge process. The expected merge time may increase with the number of languages in the repository. You also might need to plan for additional installation-related tasks.
• Consider increasing the size of your tablespaces before going live. Make sure that your custom tablespaces are large enough for upgraded tables.