Siebel Database Upgrade Guide for DB2 for z/OS > How the Siebel Database Upgrade Works >

About the Staging Database

Upgrades: All upgrades.

Environments: All environments.

Previously, for recovery purposes, in-place upgrades were not supported for Siebel mainframe-centric upgrades (an in-place upgrade occurs when upgrade changes are made directly to the existing database). Instead, a target database was built for the new release and data was unloaded from the existing source database and migrated in the appropriate format to the upgraded target database. The source database was not upgraded, although minor modifications were made to it during the upgrade process.

Since Siebel CRM 8.0, the production database is upgraded in-place. However, to accommodate host customers requirements for high-system-availability, a staging database is first created which is used to generate all the z/OS upgrade components (for example, the JCL and SQL upgrade files). The staging database allows you to generate all the midtier upgrade files and to build the JCL in advance of the actual database upgrade; this removes these steps from the critical upgrade path and minimizes system downtime.

The manual parts of the upgrade are run against the staging database. The automatic parts of the upgrade are run directly against the development or production database being upgraded (the target database).

The staging database is created from the existing development or production database that is to be upgraded (the target database). The target database DDL, and the storage control file specifying the physical database layout, are extracted and then executed in a separate DB2 subsystem to create the staging database. The staging database therefore contains the same schema and tables as the database to be upgraded, but it does not contain data.