1. Database Upgrade Guide
  2. Test Environment

Test Environment

This environment is where an installed and fully upgraded development environment undergoes the quality assurance process. This part of your upgrade process lets you tune upgrade performance in preparation for the transition to your live, production environment. Test environments are examples of "Runtime Repository" ("RR") environments, as they don't contain a Design Repository, as found in a development instance.

The test environment includes the following Siebel CRM modules:

  • Siebel Gateway
  • Siebel Server
  • Siebel Database Server files installed on a Siebel Server
  • RDBMS server and Siebel database
  • Siebel Application Interface
  • All the Siebel Business Applications currently installed in your production environment
  • A Siebel database similarly sized to the production environment

You perform these steps in the test environment:

  1. Test the upgraded release to validate its function and performance before deploying it to users.
  2. Tune the upgrade process to minimize the time required to perform your production upgrade.

Oracle provides an upgrade tuning application that analyzes how the upgrade scripts interacted with the test environment database. The Upgrade Tuner lets you tune how the scripts will execute against the Siebel database in your production environment. Tuning the scripts can significantly reduce the time required to complete the production upgrade. For this reason, the test environment database must contain the same data volume and topography as your production database.

Upgrading the test environment involves these tasks:

  1. Prepare application data. These tasks are about preparing application data for migration.
  2. Upgrade database (upgrep). You run the Database Configuration Utilities in upgrep mode. They perform a basic upgrade of the Siebel database schema:
    • You run the utility in Prepare for Production mode before running it in upgrep mode. The Prepare for Production mode reviews the upgraded development environment database schema and creates input files. The upgrep mode uses these files to make schema changes to the Siebel database.
    • The upgrep mode imports the repository and schema definition files from the development environment upgrade. It uses these files to upgrade the Siebel database.
    • The upgphys part runs automatically. It makes several administrative changes to table data, including updating the schema version in S_APP_VER. It doesn't make schema changes.
  3. Full Migration. A one-time Full Migration is mandatory after upgrading your test Runtime Repository (RR) environment from any pre-Siebel CRM 2017 version. This ensures that the RR environment knows which Development (Design Repository) environment provided its repository. It also lets you accurately generate watermarks for future incremental migrations, as well as sync all administrative data (such as LOVs). For more information on migration, see About Migrating with Siebel Migration and related topics.