The Unofficial Poster Child for Notes and Domino

    A Domino 10 Upgrade Success Story

    Robert Baehr  November 11 2018 07:29:10 AM
    Greetings:

    This weekend, out of necessity, I upgraded a production server to Domino 10.   And I believe that I barely made it to Domino 10 before a potential nightmare became reality.

    Background:
    • We have an application that was approaching the 64GB barrier of Domino 9.   Routinely, I have cleaned this application of data of questionable usefulness, rolling the cleansed version back into production.
    • I setup a test environment with this application on Domino 10, following protocol, and everything seemed to work as expected.  
    • I setup a user with the Notes 10 client, to "beat the application to death" for compatibility, functionality, speed, etc.  Zero complaints from the user.
    • I had a replica of the database on a "no-touch" Domino 9 server, which was not cleansed, just in case the data of questionable usefulness was actually useful (which it never is, but, I'm funny that way).   Having a stand-by replica was a great way to avoid the restoration of a huge 64GB file.
    • The latter exceeded the Domino 9 limit, and, the stories that I have read are correct - Domino 9 (nor I) could open the database directly.   The data could have been retrieved through "creative means", but, for all intents and purposes, the "no-touch" replica was useless in its current environment and state.
    • Application Note:  The database does not contain many attachments - it is all raw data, design, view indexes - nothing spectacular!  In addition, we've been working on an "archive" of the data therein.  The application design complexity makes this far from a trivial task.

    The "Now":

    Given the above meltdown of the "no-touch" replica, I upgraded our production Domino 9 server to Domino 10 yesterday morning.   The process was very straight forward (yes, I followed protocol), simple - and it worked, dare I say, flawlessly!    I then converted the near 64GB production application to ODS 53 (added the CREATE_R10_DATABASES to the server NOTES.INI, and, ran compact -c)  to take advantage of the new 256GB file size supported by Domino 10.   This, too, proved to be a smashing success, although, it took three hours to complete.

    The server ran overnight, with the usual maintenance tasks and scheduled agents cranking away.    This morning, I woke up to a happy, functional, and fast Domino 10 environment.

    In summary, I am, so far, pleased with the Domino 10 upgrade process, thankful for the 256GB file size limit increase, and even happier to see that performance did not degrade because of the new version of Domino.   So far, two thumbs up!

    The "Coming Soon":

    Next up - upgrading the Clients to Notes 10 this week - piece of cake, right?

    I'll share any essential updates on my journey to Notes and Domino 10 with you here - so stay tuned!

    Cheers!

    Bob Baehr
    The Unofficial Poster Child for Notes and Domino!