As most of us in the BI community are aware, In-Place upgrades are fairly common when clients want to go through minor upgrades (e.g OBIEE 11.1.1.7 to 11.1.1.9 or Business Object 4.1 SP5 to 4.1 SP 7). However, there are a number of risks which need to carefully addressed in such scenarios. Below are few examples of what can potentially go wrong and how you can leverage BI Validator to validate “In-Place” Upgrades.
- Since there is NO reference environment unlike an “Out-of-Place” upgrade, comparing dashboards and reports, performance etc becomes challenging. As an example, let’s say you have 50 dashboards with extensive customization, what is your confidence level that the dashboards have not regressed after an upgrade from say, OBIEE 11.1.1.7 to 11.1.1.9?
- Often, defects or regression in the Presentation Server module in the newer version of OBI may accidentally change the layout of the reports. For example OBIEE 11.1.1.7 to 11.1.1.9 caused an extra column to be added in the table view. In our experience, such issues slip through the cracks and and go into production, completely unnoticed. This could be minor but will leave a negative impression on the business user’s mind.
- In few cases, a minor upgrade may have an unintended impact on logical queries and that could result in unwarranted data differences in the upgraded environment. For example, in OBIEE 11.1.1.9, if you exclude a measure column with “count distinct”, the chart shows wrong data. It works find in the edit mode but shows wrong numbers when we run it.
- While in-place upgrades are inherently risky, the time allocated for Business Analysts, Quality Analysts and Testing Teams is relatively less and they may not be able to go through complete testing cycles. As an example, security (access) issues could go undetected until a business user files a service request indicating that they do not have access to a specific report in production.
- Since the production will also be upgraded, there is a need for running a quick set of regression tests before releasing the environment to the users. However, business cannot afford the long down times generally needed for validating the environment manually post upgrade.
Now, how can BI Validator help in the above situations?
BI Validator makes testing the above scenarios amazingly easy for you. Using our patented ELV architecture, you can baseline your dashboards and reports prior to the upgrade using simple user interfaces and then, run the tests after the upgrade. BI Validator presents any differences in a very intuitive manner so that the user can understand the exact differences and act accordingly.
Stay tuned to know how BI Validator can help during an “Out-of-place” Upgrade:
Try BI Validator today. It hardly takes 5 minutes to get up and running.
