Upgrade your BW system the unconventional way
In many cases we have seen that upgrading from BW3.x to 7.3 is not feasible because of limitations on authorizations etc.
Ideal Path:
It is a known fact that BW7.3 supports only analysis authorizations. This has led to an open question as to how you would upgrade a BW3.x system to BW7.3 without going through the steps of going through BW7.0.
This is because an intermediate step of BW7.0 is required so that you can migrate to analysis authorizations before migrating to 7.3 – but then the lingering question is that of whether we should test the application in its BW7.0 form before migrating to 7.3
This presents a lot of logistical challenges –
Resources : People are needed for a longer period for testing
Longer cutovers : We cannot hold back productive environments for longer periods.
Too much coordination – transports moving to BW7.0 , Development freezes etc all contribute to a royal headache
Another way of looking at it :
Install a fresh BW7.3 system
No need to elaborate this point
Transport all objects ( BW Objects sans authorizations ) from the 3.x system to the 7.3 system
Copy all the objects from the BW3.x system as transports into the 7.3 system – this is not recommended but then the structure of ODS /Cube etc is not changed – which means that these transports can be done.
Implement analysis authorizations
This would be either similar to the existing structure or reimplemented
Move the data over
Do an Export Import of the tables from the 3.x system into the 7.3 system – make sure you do both master and transaction data.
Now come the queries
Examine authorization variables and migrate / redevelop them
Transport the Queries
Now you have a single system to test and validate – once the development is validated – go ahead with the rest of the systems.
Once you have the queries with authorization variables - you can choose to create them manually / migrate the same.
Also since we are moving objects as transports - if you do any changes to these object , they might get collected as repair requests - this needs to be handled carefully.
Disclaimer : I have not done this in full - but we have tested the option of moving transports from 3.x to 7.3.
What we did was to move the objects from a 3.x system to a 7.3 system and then we did a functional migration of the objects. We reactivated all the objects and migrated the dataflow also. This would not qualify as an upgrade in technical sense.
I am just trying to reach out to understand if upgrades can be done this way instead of a mandatory two step process where we separate the application layer and the database layer .