Re: IBM Quietly Pulling Releases of V10?

Eric Rowell wrote:
I am hoping someone here would have more information about the following. Support was helpful but not as clear as I had hoped.
If you are using Passport Advantage you should notice that you can no longer download the following releases of V10;
10.00.FC2
10.00.FC6
10.00.FC7
Support says this happened because of issues being Stable and with Performance but couldn't provide anything more.
Why is this a concern of mine: End of last year we upgraded to 10.00.FC5 and within 2 weeks had to rollback due to a rare, user un-reproducible bug (which we crashed from more then once). The bug was "fixed" in 10.00.FC7, which we have deployed and is running my companies core business. If something is pulled from availability this makes me wonder if we should stay on the version. Especially when things are pull quietly.
Why so Quiet about this?
So does anyone have any details as I prepare to test FC8?
Eric B. Rowell

I understand that this is a sensitive issue for you and others in the same situation.
10.00.FC7 has a bug in the memory allocation routines that can cause serious stability problems... specifically, it can crash when there is a lot of cache cleaning (several types of cache). As any other version is has also other issues, but AFAIK this was the main reason (others include a specific problem with fragment adding, and a temp table index creation issue and btree cleaner performance problems)

Curiously, I installed this version in several customer instances and never had one crash related to the memory issue... I did hit the other two examples I mentioned above....

So, before putting FC7 into production we/they decided to move to FC8 and we had no issues with it... This doesn't mean that FC8 has no issues obviously.

I think it's quite understandable that if a significant number of customers hit the same problem, the version that has it should not be available...
For now, FC8 seams good. I have at least two important customers using it, and they had no issues so far (and it solved previous issues).
But the right thing to do is what you mention... Test it for your environment...

As an example, the ALTER FRAGMENT problem may be absolutely critical to a customer, and insignificant to another...

In your case, I would test FC8 which, again, seems nice, but if FC7 is running ok, don't rush things...

This may seem like a joke, but I work side by side with an oracle consultant, and some time ago he was defending that a fixpack fixes all the previous bugs and doesn't bring any new ones... But if you ever done any serious coding you probably know and accept that any time a programmer changes 1 line of code there is a margin for introducing new problems... Database releases are no exception, although they do suffer some intensive testing... I'd love to see the day when software "engineering" would be like "real engineering" like the construction of buildings, bridges etc... Currently it isn't, and everyone dealing with it suffers the consequences.


Regards.


--
Fernando Nunes
Portugal

http://informix-technology.blogspot.com
My email works... but I don't check it frequently...
.

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