It might be a silly question, but here goes. For anyone who has gone/is going through the v16 upgrade (and is on RAMP/Hosted services) is it possible to have your test site refreshed with data? I know in the past it's been difficult-to-not-possible. If it's not a possible thing, I can definitely see it having an effect on when we eventually decide to work on the upgrade.
thanks!
For a variety of reasons we have sprung for a Dev instance to start our v16 upgrade in. There's obviously a cost to this, but we understand we might be able to run a database reset at some point. The issue, as with even a point upgrade, but magnified greatly by an upgrade this extensive is having to wipe the entire system, restore the database, and then go through all the upgrade steps again. With v16 this involves not just a lot of migration work, but there's generally a lot of manual work that has to be done post-migration.
I am also starting my v16 upgrade in a separate test environment. no cost as its all virtualized. I have been doing a few things to, I hope, facilitate live to test to v16 test DB copies.
1. if I need to change or add anything impacting table keys in live or in v16 test I do it in both if I can at the same time so my id/key columns are always in sync.
2. for any data modification I need to make to v16 I create scripts, and keep track of the order they may need to be run in, so the second time I replicate my bright ideas
3. keep a list, in order, of manual actions i need to perform post copy/upgrade
4. for any significant user modifications i try to script copying the specific relevant table rows from the last v16 DB to the new one
5. when I copy I don't overwrite the v16 DB with the new live copy so I can refer to it if necessary.
hopefully on my first live to v16 copy ill be able copy the DB, upgrade to v16, run scripts and perform manual actions, and most importantly update my process to take into account what didn't go as planned. rinse and repeat.
All very true. It's been (5?) years since the last time I've had to do a major upgrade, and thought I remembered something about a way to force a data refresh between the different versions, but... as ever, thank you for the sanity check!