[Koha-devel] Upgrade db to v19.11

[David Nind]

Hi Paul.

a) I can't speak with any experience on this, but I think the upgrade
should work fine. The main thing to do is to test first in a development
environment with a copy of your database. Others with more experience will
hopefully comment on any gotchas updating from that version. There are also
many improvements and enhancements since 3.8.24, so you will probably need
to spend time seeing what is new/changes. With reports you will most likely
need to test these to make sure they work as expected, as database changes
may affect them.

b) Either Debian and Ubuntu LTS should work fine. The latest Ubuntu LTS
(18.04) is good as far as I'm aware. With Debian 10 (Buster) I think there
are a couple of packaging issues still to resolve.

c) A packaged install is the recommended way to install Koha these days. It
also makes updates for security and maintenance releases much easier.
Rather than having to use CPAN to manually install all the right versions
of Perl modules, the packaging takes care of it all (and there are a lot of
Perl modules that Koha uses). While it is possible, I think you are in for
a great deal of effort and pain if you install from a tarball.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_ubuntu_-_packages

Hopefully others who are familiar with updating from older versions can
offer some specific advice from their experiences.

David Nind | david.nind at gmail.com
PO Box 12367, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand 6144
m. +64 21 0537 847


On Sun, 15 Dec 2019 at 04:11, Paul A <paul.a at navalmarinearchive.com> wrote:

> I have the possibility over the next month or two of examining the
> upgrading Koha from 3.8.24 to 19.11 (latest stable release.)  We have
> the hardware available, but have a couple of questions before I plan the
> workflow:
>
> a) database migration? I have looked at the schemas, and am worried that
> there are substantial changes. Our production servers contain some
> 250,000 items. We are not a lending library, so have no concerns with
> that side of library management -- only with pure cataloguing, for which
> we use over 100 custom reports, 900 "sources", ten customized biblio
> frameworks, etc -- how best to proceed? Is there a script (or multiple
> scripts) that would do it?
>
> b) server software? does "pure" Debian (which we have never used in
> production) have advantages over Ubuntu LTS (with which we are extremely
> comfortable)?
>
> c) We normally build from tarballs, but have received some criticism in
> the past. The reason is that once we have a server locked into
> production, we never (major security excepted) touch it; our 3.8.24 has
> now been running for 1,467 days without rebooting, and "if it ain't
> broken, leave it alone."  Is the final installation package/tarball
> identical using the different methods?
>
> Thanks in advance for your advice.
> Season's greetings,
> Paul
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