Why Upgrade to V17

Ingen Software has used SAP SQL Anywhere since 2003 because it is a solid relational database foundation with nearly bulletproof data integrity and can be easily scaled for client needs. There are free databases available that do not have the features, performance, or stability of SQL Anywhere and bigger databases from other vendors that require more staff and hardware personnel to manage. SQL Anywhere is the perfect fit for most of our customers.

However, as with other software and OS vendors, older versions become unsupported and new features are added to newer, supported versions only. At this time, SAP has stopped supporting version 16. In order to continue providing the best possible database support to our customers, Ingen Software is now upgrading our customers on version 16 to version 17, the current supported version of SQL Anywhere. 

Recommendations

We strongly recommend users upgrade to version 17. There is no known "drop dead date" that will cause significant issues for users of version 16. However, the hardware and operating systems will eventually release an update that causes the software to not run anymore. At that time, the only option is to update. 

After the update, databases will continue working as normally and servers will continue running the same speed as before the update. If system failures do occur, customers will not lose their data so long as they have backups. Caution: if customers do not have backups, recovery of data will be very expensive. 

To update, users must have a current OASIS software maintenance agreement with Ingen Software. If you are unsure, contact customer support.

Cost

To determine the cost impact to your company, contact customer support for more information.

We recommend that an external USB hard drive before purchased be before the upgrade. It is best to begin the upgrade process by backing up the  version 11 or version 16 database to the USB drive. The USB drive may also be used for the upgrade if your server is limited in available disk space.

For planning purposes we recommend that the available hard drive space on the server (or USb attached drive be equal to two times the size of your oasis.db and oasis.log files added together. For example, if oasis.db is 100 GB and oasis.log is 500 MB, then we recommend that 201 GB or more available disk space be available for the upgrade. Note: this could be available space on an external USB attached drive. At the time of this writing, a $100 USB drive is 2000 GB or 2TB, which is far more than what is generally required most customers.

Contact Us

When you are ready to update, contact customer support at (501) 843-6750. Our support staff can review your upgrade plan and schedule a time for your upgrade to ensure a specialist is available in the remote chance that issues occur.  Additionally, we can use past statistics to estimate the amount of time required to upgrade your database.

Note: plan on the database being down for four hours or more in many cases. The time varies, depending on the size of the database and the available hardware resources.