I agree that soft upgrade has a value, but I think you give soft upgrade
credit for things that are actual not provided by soft upgrade. More
comments below.
Kathey Marsden wrote:
Rick Hillegas wrote:
4) What is the customer problem solved by Soft Upgrade?
Soft upgrade solves many problems for users , support and
development. It:
- Minimizes end user intervention in accordance with Derby's charter
http://db.apache.org/derby/derby_charter.html.
which calls for ease of use and zero administration for end users.
It is not soft upgrade that minimizes end user intervention. That is
provided by automatic upgrade (soft or hard). In fact, soft upgrade
increases user intervention since you will need to explicitly state that
you want to do a hard upgrade. Without soft upgrade, hard upgrades
could have been done automatically.
- Encourages upgrade and reduces the need to port fixes to old releases.
I agree that people will probably be less hesistant to upgrade to new
releases if they are able to revert to their old release. In my
opinion, that is the only value of soft upgrade. In itself, I would not
think that using the old data format should make it much less risky to
upgrade than using a new data format. And if I had to downgrade due to
problems with the new release, how do I know that this new faulty
release has not corrupted my database?
- Provides applications, embedding or including Derby a scalable
deployment option for distributing new versions of Derby.
How is soft upgrade provide more scalable deployment than hard upgrade?
--
Øystein
