Matt, I wouldn't recommend updating a production instance against the trunk without testing. I generally do recommend to clients who are doing customizations or building on top of OFBiz that they update against the trunk frequently during development, and then stop before integration (general system) testing, or at least stop for their release candidate branch and continue updating against the OFBiz trunk for their development branch.
As for database changes, the Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration page is manually updated and therefore not totally reliable. I'd recommend running the Check/Update database stuff in the Entity Engine by changing your entityengine.xml file to not automatically update anything (ie don't add new tables or columns, etc), and then look at the startup log or use webtools to see the differences between the current entity definitions and the meta-data in your database. -David On Aug 30, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Matt Warnock wrote: > I run a small enterprise and I doubt our needs are unusual. We would > like to run trunk and stay (more or less) current. We're running > postgresql as a backend. I'm hoping to automate (as much as possible) > the update process. I'm hoping to implement a few things not provided > in the standard demo setup. > > 1) I need to backup the database nightly, so that our daily work doesn't > get lost (doh!). I can use pg_dump for that, but of course it backs up > the entire database, including seed, admin-user-login, and site-specific > data. I could also use the webtools dump, which I assume does the exact > same thing but in XML, which is a good deal larger in file size. > However, webtools won't write an XML file for an empty table, while > pg_dump would write a structure definition for that table. Probably > pg_dump would be a good deal faster. Size and speed issues aside, it > seems that neither method differentiates in any way between seed and > non-seed data. Am I correct here? > > 2) To effectively use the webtools backup, I would need to automate it > from a cron job. Is there an easy way to call ofbiz services from the > command line, or do I need to schedule a job within OFBiz to do this > kind of thing? What are the pros and cons of a system cron job vs. a > scheduled job in OFBiz? > > 3) I need a log of what version I was running when. For example, if I > update weekly, and on Sunday night I roll forward to the latest trunk > revision 970999, and it breaks something, I need to have a log that > tells me that Friday (when it worked) I was running 970888, so I can > roll back to that revision, until I get the kinks worked out with the > upgrade. Otherwise I have to restore from a dated backup, which I can > always do, but it seems that a simple "svn checkout 970888; ./ant build" > might be cleaner. I'm assuming that after updating the code with "svn > checkout" I can log the date/time to a file with the output of "svn > info". > > 4) If a revision requires a database update or modification, I would > like to know about it in advance, and make sure that manual modification > is completed before the upgrade. I'm assuming what I need there should > always be found in: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring > +Data+Migration > > 5) I would like to update all seed data in place (postgresql) without > overwriting the rest of the (non-seed) data. Will executing "./ant > run-install-seed" overwrite the EXISTING seed data in a production > database without affecting the non-seed data? Or it it only intended > for use on an empty database, as all the examples I have found do? If > the latter, how do you restore only the NON-seed data after a seed data > initialization? > > Are there any other bear traps or best practices that I should be aware > of? Or is this stuff documented somewhere that I have not found? There > was a discussion of it (at least the seed vs. demo data issue) about a > year ago on this list, but I didn't see these specific questions > answered. > > Or am I overly optimistic about the possibility of updating a production > system regularly as OFBiz trunk changes? > > Thanks in advance. >
