Focal Point
Migrate configuration but not data from Dev to Prod?

This topic can be found at:
https://forums.informationbuilders.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1461084022/m/54210895

March 26, 2009, 03:46 PM
Moogle
Migrate configuration but not data from Dev to Prod?
Hi,

Here's the situation:

We've got a production environment that has lots of data, but only live measures. This means that they have been UAT'ed and validated, and are used by the business.

We've got a development environment that has "moving target" data, depending on what's being worked on. It has all the live measures and some development measures. I'd describe a development measure as a work in progress, and it may or may not have data, but it will have a configured measure metadata and loader for each.

Now, the user asked me today how they would migrate the development measures to prod. I suggested re-keying them, but that didn't go over well. She had a valid point about how re-entering something could lead to errors not present in dev, plus something about re-work being bad...

So, is it possible to backup a portion of the Dev datamart and restore that portion in Prod? Just the configuration bits, not the data. If not that, is there a best practice for this sort of thing?

Cheers,

Joey


-WebFOCUS 8.2.01 on Windows
March 30, 2009, 05:14 PM
Bob Jude Ferrante
SO we've had two questions about this in a few days... are you both from the same company? Or is this just a topic that's gaining currency?

I'm sort of going to paste my response to the other topic to this one as well...

We haven't and aren't yet making a commitment to do such a thing yet. But we coudl explore the implications and expectations for such a capability. So...

What aspects of a measure would you think should be transportable between instances? Is it just the measure definitions and metadata, or the values as well which you would primarily are interested in transporting? Would you expect the software to indicate if the data could not be correctly synchronized between the environments due to things like naming conflicts, dimensions not loaded on target, dimensions loaded differently between the source and the target? Any other capabilities you would expect from this?


Bob Jude Ferrante
Director of Business and Development
WebFOCUS Performance Management
Bob_Ferrante@ibi.com
917-339-5105

I'll take any questions about PMF - business or technical - anytime!

March 31, 2009, 09:13 AM
Moogle
Hi Bob,

Thanks for the reply. I did notice the other post as well, and yes, that's a post by my client (trigger dramatic musical flourish... Duh duh duuuuh)!

To answer your questions and feedback:

I would love to be able to transport my dashboards and gadgets, since I'm starting to build them for my next phase. The fact that you said that's in development means I will have to do it manually for now, so that's something for me to plan for. Good to know.

We would like to transport just the measure definition (the Edit Measure screen contents) plus the setup of the Measure Loader (field mappings, source table, refresh method). Naming conflicts or missing dimensions should cause a full stop of the migration, in my opinion. Differently loaded dimensions would show up when we try to load the measure, so that's not something that needs to be handled.

Suppose, just suppose, that we wanted to try to extract the measure info from the datamart... is there any guidance you could provide as to which tables would be involved? I'm not saying we'd extract from dev and then load into prod, but if we could extract from dev, manually key in prod, extract from prod, we would have a solid method to compare setups between environments (examine the two extracts for differences).

Cheers,

Joey
March 31, 2009, 10:29 AM
Demanda
Yes I agree with Joey on what he suggests to transport: Edit measures contents and the contents on each of the tabs of Measure Loader(Dimensions, Field Maps and Filters)


Business Analyst - Specialist in Business Intelligence