Upgrading to PH 8.13, 8.23

[Dave Barker]

Dirk

Your experiences sound familiar.  Our current environment is AIX 4.2 and
Oracle 7.3.  We attempted to upgrade to PH 8.13 over a year ago but
eventually had to revert back to PH 7.33 in order to release working
software to our customer base.

Under PH 8.13 a number of our screens containing cursors stopped working.
We found two separate issues responsible for this.

Firstly, cursors performing calculations with SUM or UNION on decimal
numbers resulted in the fields dropping the fraction part.  Cognos
identified this as a change in behaviour - under PH 7.33, the services code
returned the results using the datatype of the column on which the
calculation was based whereas under PH 8.13, the database performs the
calculation (it is a more efficient approach) but by default only returns
the rounded integer portion.  Our only option is to manually change our code
when we move onto the PH 8 Series which is not an insignificant task based
on the number of screens using SUM or UNION.

Secondly, we found a screen containing a cursor which stopped working under
PH 8.13.  Cognos have only recently given us the explanation for this as
follows: 'the Data Access Layer in PowerHouse 8.13 does not contain the
required functionality to compare a parameter ( i.e :phE2 )  with the return
type of a function ( i.e truncate (CU.CUSTOMER) ). It is unable to determine
the return type of "truncate (CU.CUSTOMER)" and therefore the data access
layer returns "sqlUnknownType" for ":phE2".'  PH 8.3 (not available until
the end of this year) will apparently contain the required functionality.
Because of the extensive use of cursors in our applications it would be a
near impossible task to fully test each one and, if necessary, find and
apply a work-around in the short-term.

We also experienced more frequent rollbacks when testing under PH 8.13 than
previously under PH 7.33, although this was more difficult to reproduce in
simple test cases.

We are very eager to move onto the PH 8 Series for the following reasons:

1. Devt support for PH 7.33 stopped last June.

2. There is a supposedly more robust version (2.1E) of PH-Client available
for PH 8.13.

3. We need to consider moving from Oracle 7 to Oracle 8 for both commercial
and support reasons (devt support for Oracle 7 stops in December).

4. There are new features available in the PH 8 Series which we have not
been able to make use of.


Dave Barker
Specialist Business Solutions

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-powerh-l@sphere.swau.edu
> [mailto:owner-powerh-l@sphere.swau.edu]On Behalf Of Rohde Dirk (Van)
> Sent: 02 May 2000 18:29
> To: 'PowerHouse List Server'
> Subject: RE: Upgrading to PH 8.13, 8.23
>
>
> Also looking for any experiences with doing the same upgrade on AIX (4.2).
>
> Dirk Rohde
> VantagePoint Group
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rohde Dirk (Van) [mailto:Dirk.Rohde@vpgroup.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2000 10:21 AM
> To: 'PowerHouse List Server'
> Subject: Upgrading to PH 8.13, 8.23
>
>
> We are looking at upgrading PowerHouse from version 7.33 to version 8.13,
> and possibly to version 8.23.  We are running on HP/UX (B.10.20) using an
> Oracle 7.3 database.  When we tried this upgrade previously, we had
> experienced various database problems with some of our embedded SQL
> statements, among other problems.  Has anyone done this upgrade
> recently and
> what were the results like?
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