next release - thoughts on upgrade?

[Mike Matrigali <mi...@sbcglobal.net>]

I would like to start a thread on what derby's approach to upgrade in
future releases should be.  I am motivated as this affects some design
issues for derby-96.  To start it off I will try to summarize what
model cloudscape had or was moving to.

For this note I will use the following terms:
soft upgrade - A new release of the softare is used, the user connects
to the system the same as in the past, and the software automatically
does any upgrades necessary to function - but leaves existing data such
that the original version of the software can be reinstalled and still
work.

hard upgrade - A new release of the software is used, the user connects
to the system indicating it should automatically upgrade itself as it
accesses the data.  In this past this was done by adding an upgrade=true
 to the connection url.  After this upgrade completes old versions of
the software can not be used.

Minor releases of cloudscape, were considered bug fix releases and
either did no upgrade or only soft upgrade.

Major releases of cloudscape, only did hard upgrade.  We were
considering requiring soft upgrade support for all future versions.

Requiring soft upgrade support can be a lot of work especially in cases
like new row/page formats.  I would like to hear some opinions on what
should derby support in the future. We have made a good first step by
providing derby users a stable branch upon which they can base their
applications and not worry about upgrade/stability issues.

Re: next release - thoughts on upgrade?

[Daniel John Debrunner <dj...@debrunners.com>]

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Mike Matrigali wrote:

> I would like to start a thread on what derby's approach to upgrade in
> future releases should be.  I am motivated as this affects some design
> issues for derby-96.  To start it off I will try to summarize what
> model cloudscape had or was moving to.
>

Just to add some background, I also discussed the versioning/upgrade in
the first two posts of this thread

http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=derby-dev@db.apache.org&by=thread&from=869346

Dan.
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