Hmm. Advice or comments would be most welcome on the following before we go any further…
We had a network issue a couple of weeks ago which caused some problems with both our development and production environments. Production has been restored from a backup and seems fine so the users are happy. However we can’t as yet restore Development successfully - getting errors during the restore process.
Currently all the Dev universes are on my pc. Some of these are not yet in Prod as they’re still being worked on. We normally migrate Dev to Prod via the wizard.
Assuming we can’t fix Dev with a restore, what is the best way to proceed?. Can we rebuild from scratch? If I opened my local universes and exported to the “new” Dev, would the core ids survive? I can’t afford for the core ids to get scrambled on any eventual migration to Prod as there are hundreds of reports hanging off them. I have reports in Dev but they are disposable.
Or would we be better off making our current Prod into Dev and then creating a new Prod?
Or is there a better way? We’re on XIr2. Not sure if this is even the right forum. All thoughts welcome!
Assuming you didn’t save your universes “For all users”, you won’t be able to open them in Designer if you can’t connect to the old dev CMS. What I would suggest would be to build a new dev, and migrate all content from prod into it. For the universes that you need to get into dev from your PC, you can locate the .unv files in the FRS, and overwrite them with your local copies. That might result in a connection error when you import the universe, but it should allow you to simply select one of the existing universes.
Hi Joe. Thanks for your advice. Fortunately our wonderful techies managed to get the restore to work late last night when I had given up hope.
But I’m curious anyway, in case this happens again. If we built a new Dev environment and migrated the contents of Prod into it, what would happen to the core ids? Would they be the same as the local copies on my pc? I’ve never understood how the core ids actually work and how “save for all users” affects them.
Ideally I’d love to have an independent set of universes stored, so that I could recover from a network crash, but if the core ids of our production universes got scarmbled, I’d get lynched by the business as none of the reports would run!
I’m now left with one universe on my pc that I can’t open. This is one I was working on locally before the problems we had but after the Dev backup which was restored. Obviously my pc talked to the Dev CMS when I created the universe, but since the restored environment is prior to its creation, it now knows nothing! It’s a days work, but I can recreate if necessary.
I’m trying to persuade them to commit to an upgrade to R3, if only for the release management software!
The best thing you can do as far as ensuring your universes are safe is to take a regular BIAR-file extract of them. Even if you have to rebuild the CMS, restoring from the BIAR will ensure that the universe CUIDs remain intact.
I understand your fear of using “Save for all users”, as that was a sure-fire way to cause disconnected reports in 6.5. I haven’t tested this, but I suspect that this is not as dangerous in Xi, since you can then overwrite the original universe in the CMS, which will cause the local universe to adopt the CMS universe’s CUID.
Regarding the universe on your PC – I assume you’re getting a “not authorized” error when you try to open the .unv? There is a resolution to that problem, described here.
We have seen many cases where the core id’s get lost/changed, … when you move things between CMS systems.
The workflow do vary but the issue is always the same. links between universes/reports are broken and fixing is not easy
Deleting a universe or owner is also a sure thing to create a big mess too.
There 2 actions I would strongly recommend :
1.Save universes and documents for all users. just in case you break it really bad
2. Create a cold backup of your system (daily) just in case you ever really need to restore it you only loose 1 day of work
Using the Biar and import wizard can help but may also cause some issues to your CMS.
When ever possible work with the file names as a match and not the CUID. I have seen too many cases where the CUID’s are different in the CMS systems for all kind of valid reasons…
Consider the implementation of a change management and versioning solution and process.
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