Upgrading from OpenDCS 6 to OpenDCS 7

[CarrJuan]

Good afternoon the Bureau of Reclamation is looking for any documentation or lessons learned when upgrading OpenDCS 6 to OpenDCS 7. Specifically migrating, routing scripts, platforms, sites and networking list within the Decode Database. We are currently running Red Hat Linux 9. Any information is appreciated and welcomed. Thank You.

[MikeNeilson]

That kinda depends.

There's a few newer, though not ready for prime time features where having some newer schema elements and making use of the new "schema migration" utility would be advantages, so starting a fresh db and doing a dbexport (and compexport if using computations) followed by the imports may make the most sense.

At the same time we are maintaining compatibility with the 6.8 schema, so you'd at least want to go through any steps to update the schema to that.... though easier said than done if you haven't been keeping up.

RHEL 9 shouldn't be an issue, would recommend using at least Java 11 though, or even Java 17, as we test opendcs 7.0 up to Java 17 and the performance should be better.

USACE has been doing the in-place updates on their production systems, though there's a group of people for the database schema updates and custom update scripts where created.

For you though, might be good to do fresh db using new tools and then export/import. If you have a schema version to leap that will be the least problematic and you can update Postgres at the same time. I think we test again 15 or 16 but 17 should work - pretty sure we got that one syntax issue you reported resolved.

See https://github.com/orgs/opendcs/discussions/11 for instructions on the migration tool