This is one of the most annoying discussions we can have :)
I believe I already stated my perspective here (or other forums before), but here goes again...
First, let me state I fully understand your situation, and even customers concerns, but I do believe it misses some points which are important. Let's settle a few things first:
1- ANY upgrade is a lot of work to be done properly (essentially due to the necessary tests, not because of the technical upgrade itself)
2- ANY upgrade is a risk. In today's environment, where in general people are heavily overloaded with work, and resources are low, we all tend to favor the idea that "if it works, leave it"
3- ALL versions have bugs! This may not look well on the mouth of an IT supplier employee, but facts are facts, and whoever wants to oppose to this idea, I suggest them to pick up the "next version" fixlist. Doesn't matter which vendor, product, or version we're talking about
4- OCCASIONALLY there is a very nasty version coming out. It may be the FC1, or the FC7 (the older guys may recall 10.00.FC7...)
5- What is a stable version for a customer can be an awful version for another. If you happen to hit a nasty bug that "only" happens on your environment, it will turn a wonderful version into a nasty one
So... What I mean is that you don't really know how good is a version until you test it... within your environment and with your code. And the work involved in testing 12.10.FC13 on a customer environment is basically the same to test 14.10.FC3. And the advantages are huge in favor of 14.10 specially if you also consider the lifetime it has, compared with 12.10...
I understand the fear of being the first..., but I don't understand the "confort" of being among the last ones. And if you decide to move to 14.10.xCn ("n" being a confortable number) and then you have the bad luck of 14.10.xCn being a "nasty one"?
What customers should be concerned with, is to improve their ability to test their code in their conditions, as soon as possible, with as little work as possible. Improve their ability to rapidly provide test environments (cloud, private cloud, docker, VMs, Data Virtualization, etc., etc.) and to have the ability to test their applications and ecosystem in a more automated way... This is really where the value is nowadays...
If they manage to do this, they will know when the time is right...
Having said this, I can understand no one will want to jump into production with *FC1... But they should integrate *FC1 in the process above.
Besides, how many of those customers monitor the latest fixpacks's fixlist? Are they aware of the nasty bugs that have been found in the versions above their current version, and that could byte them at any time? Do they evaluate the risk of those bugs vs the work to upgrade?...
New versions should be put to the tests as soon as they're available... that and the monitoring of fixes and new features should dictate when to upgrade, and to which version.
All the rest are just opinions, common sense, and ghosts... Not the things that should matter for this sort of decisions, when your software is important for your business.
Regards.
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FERNANDO NUNES
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu December 12, 2019 09:26 AM
From: SangGyu Jeong
Subject: Are there many customers using Informix version 14.10?
Thanks Art,
Customers are afraid that they will be test cases because no other customer has upgraded Informix to version 14.10 yet.
That's why I think customers are considering upgrading to 12.10 version.
Anyway, I need to convince the customer to explain and upgrade the 14.10 enhancements.
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SangGyu Jeong
Software Engineer
Infrasoft
Seoul Korea, Republic of
Original Message:
Sent: Thu December 12, 2019 09:14 AM
From: Art Kagel
Subject: Are there many customers using Informix version 14.10?
SangGyu Jeong:
Version 14.10.xC3 which was released last week contains, as far as I know, all known critical bug fixes and is the first stable release of v14.10. I do recommend to my clients that they upgrade to v14.10 sometime this year. At this point I do not have any active production users of v14.10.
There are many advantages to using v14.10 over v12.10. Here are some highlights:
- RSS and HDR secondary latency vastly improved resulting in a 50% or better reduction in latency and a reduction in overhead to the primary.
- The code improvements for secondary latency also improved crash recovery making recovery after a crash more than twice as fast.
- Performance improvements in many queries and transactions of about 10%.
- Storage optimization (aka on disk compression) is included in Enterprise Edition v14.10 (was an extra cost option in v11 & v12).
- Encryption At Rest (EAR) - was not available in v11 or v12. In v14.10.FC2 and later you can even use a remote key store like Amazon's to store encryption keys.
- Improved support for backup-to-the-cloud using online cloud storage services.
Art
Art S. Kagel, President and Principal Consultant
ASK Database Management
Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that my own opinions are my own opinions and do not reflect on the IIUG, nor any other organization with which I am associated either explicitly, implicitly, or by inference. Neither do those opinions reflect those of other individuals affiliated with any entity with which I am affiliated nor those of the entities themselves.
Original Message------
Hi All,
My customers using Informix version 11.70 are considering upgrading Informix next year for reasons such as end of support. Customers commonly believe that Informix version 14.10 will be unstable only after a year of release. So customers want to upgrade to version 12.10. Besides, there are no customers using Informix version 14.10 in Korea as far as I know.
I think using version 14.10 rather than version 12.10 will provide better support for patching and case open from IBM and HCL Technologies.
Are there many customer cases using 14.10 except for Korea?
If so, it would be easy to persuade the customer to upgrade to version 14.10.
Or how can I convince my customers to upgrade to version 14.10 if they believe that version 12.10 will be more stable?
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SangGyu Jeong
Software Engineer
Infrasoft
Seoul Korea, Republic of
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#Informix