Solaris upgrade

Bill Davis (bdavis@NREL.ColoState.EDU) wrote:
: Has anyone encountered any major headaches when upgrading Ingres V6.402 from
: SUN OS4.3 to Solaris (SUN OS5.4).  We will be upgrading our entire system of
: Sun SPARC workstations next week and I am interested in hearing about any
: unpleasant experiences outside of the normal pains of installing the new
: Ingres software or unloading and reloading the database.

Hi Bill, we have just done the same operation, and these are the main problems
we encountered . . . .

	- Solaris 5.4 as default does NOT come with a compiler - no compiler
	  no Ingres, period.
        - If you choose to use the latest gcc (5.? I can't remember) - beware
          In addition to changes to the Ingres make script (iilink in the 
	  utility subdirectory) you need to make changes to various other files
          for any software development in ABF or W4GL.  Also we had numerous 
          problems with double (f8) precision fp in some ESQL/C stuff. It 
          seemed that the compiler was not correctly Word aligning sizeof(double)
	  in some of our SQLDA stuff - leading to erratic Core Dumps.

		- We gave up on gcc after four days due to the above problem
   		  without finding a sensible resolution to it.

	- If you choose the SUN SparcWorks compiler make sure you get the right
	  version (2.1 or higher) or you could have problems, and as they don't
	  link to /bin/cc as default you will either have to do this manually
          or put the /opt/SUNWspro (or whatever) path into the chkins script
          in the utility subdirectory.

	- We also had problems (this made no sense but believe me it happened)
	  porting executables from one Solaris 2.4 Ingres installation to 
          another.  Basically, any ESQL/C program with an EXEC SQL CONNECT TO
  	  ..  IDENTIFIED AS ... statement compiled on one Installation would
          not port to another installation where the II_SYSTEM variable was 
          different!!!.  For the doubting thomases - I have truss output 
          showing the executable trying to open files in the compiler hosts
          filesystems!!!  The workaround was of course to make sure we 
          compiled on the installation where the software was to be used.

        - There was also a problem (well weakness) caused by careless coding
	  if you have a big ESQL/C program which connects to the database
          multiple times, and you submit an EXEC SQL DISCONNECT request
	  when the program is not currently connected to a database (though 
	  it has been previously) this causes the program to 'runaway' - ie
	  get caught in a loop. Trussing of the program shows the ingres library
	  functions trapping sigsegv - then causing a sigsegv - which is trapped
	  - causing a sigsegv . . . usw.  This one we couldn't fix.


Thats all I can think of for the moment (I don't have my notes with me at
present).  Despite this - it's well worth it - the performance of our dual
processor boxes is heaps better.

Rgds Mike

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