This article covers best practice for performing a Yellowfin upgrade.
Firstly, before we begin, it's important to understand, there are 2 'types' of upgrades.
- Major upgrades: This is going between two major releases, e.g. 6.3 > 7.2 , 7.1 > 7.2 etc..
- Minor upgrades: This is going between monthly patches, e.g. 7.2 April release > 7.2 July release.
The process for both upgrades is pretty much the same, just more test points.
1. Ensure you have a backup of the environment prior to testing
While we like to think our upgrades run perfectly and smoothly, in reality we understand that each environment is different and undiscovered issues can arise.
If you simply make a backup of your Yellowfin repository DB & Yellowfin application folder, you have everything you need to rollback if you ever need to.
Steps on how to rollback Yellowfin are mentioned here
2. Make sure Yellowfin is not running during the upgrade.
While upgrading with Yellowfin running will not cause it to fail, it can cause style/UI issues until Yellowfin is restarted, or you may even need to re-upgrade Yellowfin.
Stopping it in the first place will stop any of this from occurring.
3. If performing a major upgrade.
Upgrade directly to your target version and build.
4. Test, Test, Test post upgrade.
This is one of the most important steps. While we do test extensively here at Yellowfin, we cannot test against every possible environment as there are simply too many variables.
Because of this, it's extremely important to test commonly used reports/dashboards/views post upgrade to ensure the end user will not notice a difference other than it looking and performing better.
This could entail ensuring each dashboard that all users have subscribed to work without errors, or that important sales report is displaying correctly.
If you have custom styles, it is important to check these with major releases, as styles usually change so you will need to update yours accordingly.
Other areas recommended for checking are Broadcasts & Scheduled cached filters (This is easily checked via 'Schedule Management' under Administration).
When testing you should:
- Mirror your production environment so that you have separate identical instance you can call your 'test' environment
- Run the upgrade
- Perform your tests
- Once you have confirmed the tests are all good, you can upgrade your production environment
This way if issues are found in testing, you can contact us here at Yellowfin Support for assistance while your users can continue working on your production instance without being affected.
Going through the above 1, 2, 3 will ensure the smoothest possible upgrade, whether it's a minor or major release.
If you do run into any issues, please contact the Support team to get this resolved.
Related article/s:
How to run a Yellowfin upgrade
File attached:
v7.3 Change Management document
v7.4 Change Management document