[Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

[Jane Davis]

I upgraded a week ago today.... I was not at 5.1.x so I had to upgrade to that first.  I installed Oracle on my data drive.  The upgrade went OK.  I did call tech support about a JAVA questions and they were helpful.

I found the Sybase to Oracle Migration Guide to be the only reference material that I needed to follow.

The only glitches that I have encountered have been with permissions to print from the students function menu.  For some reason in the group security section -  every group had the print report permission unchecked.  So I had to check it so that we could print reports.     Also, in the district office, I could only choose one year in the terms pull down menu.  I called tech support and they just had me recreate the years and terms in the district office.  It is only needed to print reports or do EOY.

I did EOY Wednesday and so far everything looks fine.

If you want to do a manual backup -download the Oracle database backup and restore guide - On page 3 of that guide the SID it references is PSPRODDB
It backs up to the drive:\oradata\flash_recovery_area\PSPRODDB\BackupSet directory

Remember that you want to upgrade so that you can get state reporting updates.
Also remember to fill in the new update path to srupdates.powerschool.com
In the automatic update found at  Start Page<http://172.16.1.249/admin/home.html> > System Administrator<http://172.16.1.249/admin/tech/home.html> > System Settings<http://172.16.1.249/admin/systemsettings/home.html> > Automatic Updating

Jane



From: powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org [mailto:powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org] On Behalf Of Curt Qualset
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 10:23 AM
To: 'Dave Evertson'; powerschool at lists.esu10.org
Subject: RE: [Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

I ran into the same thing as you, Dave.  Thought it was just our setup but I guess not.  I had to exclude those same folders and files as well.  So far this week the nightly backups look like they are working without any problems. But I was seeing my hang ups on the weekend at the same time the backup started on Friday night (the one log file that showed the errors got as big as 24 GB good thing I had plenty of room on the Hard drive); so we will see what happens when I come in on Monday next week, whether I have to re-boot the server and call PS support for a fix again or it works like it should.

Let's cross our fingers.

I was kind of leery about this upgrade with Oracle b/c of at my previous work; they upgraded their data base to use Oracle in the fall (around October) and by the time I left there in August of the next year they were still trying to work out the bugs.  So when I read that PS had some schools for test sites (ginnie pigs) I figured they would have worked out pretty much most of the issues, I know you can't get them all and everyone's setup is different.  But things like this they need to explain better which is like pulling teeth sometimes to get info out of PS.

Thanks,

Curt Qualset
Technology Coordinator, CompTIA A+ Certified
Elkhorn Valley Schools
PO Box 430
Tilden, NE 68781
402-368-5301
________________________________
From: powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org [mailto:powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org] On Behalf Of Dave Evertson
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 2:33 PM
To: powerschool at lists.esu10.org
Subject: [Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

Just a note on the saga of the PowerSchool upgrade to Premier 5.2...

I ran EOY before the upgrade, went through the upgrade and did the WRONG thing on the Oracle install, placing it on two drives instead of one.  Windows server users, make sure you install Oracle on a single drive, and make that drive your data drive.  I had to restore to Sybase from backup and run through the upgrade process again to get this fixed.

After the successful upgrade, things went well for a few days and then the server would hang at night, stuck in a comm process loop.  The log window would just be scrolling with unreadable errors.  After shutting down and rebooting, sometimes the app would run and sometimes it would encounter an error connecting to the database.  When I could not get the app to run, I would restore to the previous good backup and it would work, but that would not be practical when lots of data was being changed when school is in session.

The first fix PS had us do was upgrade from JDK 1.4 to 1.5.  If you haven't done that yet, it's not made immediately obvious that you need to or how to do it.  You have to go to the Java web site archives and find the old 1.5 to download and install, it is not available on the support site, and is not available on the common java site for downloads because the latest version is 1.6 (which you don't want).

That fix did not solve our problem of nightly hangs, so we were elevated to an engineer who found the problem was a small, corrupt data file.  He restored this and informed me that our antivirus (sophos) or backup software (backupexec) was probably causing this as the open file was read during a scan or while backing up.  My guess is it was more the backup software, because it runs and incremental backup nightly about the time the problem would occur.  This was never a problem with the Sybase database.

So, here are the recommendations PS support gave me.  Exclude the drive:/oracle and drive:/oradata directories from active and on-access virus scans.  Also exclude these from backup, except for the drive:/oradata/flash_recovery_area.  The flash_recovery_area holds the backup files of the PS data and can be restored if Oracle would ever need to be reinstalled, so those are the data files you want to back up.

I was informed that the PowerSchool data folder is no longer used with Oracle, all the data is in the PowerschoolPremier and Oradata directories.  Since Sybase used the PowerSchooldata directory for data and backups, it is quite large and can be removed/archived once the switch is made to oracle.  This would free up lots of space on your server, ours is over 60 GB.  There is no longer any need to remove the translog files periodically.

Hope that helps some of you avoid the problems we have had.

Dave Evertson
Cozad City Schools
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