Overview of the upgrade process

You can upgrade to Adaptive Server 12.5 from any of these versions:

For a server installation older than version 11.5.x, Sybase recommends that you upgrade to one of the versions above, then upgrade to version 12.5.

You can upgrade Adaptive Server from a 32-bit version to a 64-bit Version, but you cannot move from a 64-bit version to a 32-bit version. Likewise, you can only upgrade from an earlier version of Adaptive Server to a more recent version.

Only upgrades from 2K pages to 2K pages are supported. Changing the server schema from a 2K page to nK page size is a database migration, not an upgrade.

For information about migrating your database schema from a 2K page to a 4K, 8K, or 16K page, see “Migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit versions”.

Upgrading Adaptive Server consists of four processes:

The preupgrade and upgrade utilities are internally called by the sqlupgrade utility.

Each new version of Adaptive Server contains different features that introduce new parameters, commands, reserved words, and so on. For this reason, the new Adaptive Server to which you are upgrading is responsible for preparing the old server for the upgrade.

The new server provides a utility, sqlupgrade, that runs various checks, such as reserved word checks, to determine how much space you must add to the old server to successfully upgrade the old server to the new.

As part of the pre-upgrade tasks, sqlupgrade scans all databases and catalogs and determines how much free space is required for each to upgrade successfully. Essentially, sqlupgrade searches for the largest catalog, then calculates the required free space by doubling the size of the largest catalog, and adding approximately 10 percent for logging the upgrade changes for each catalog.

During the pre-upgrade process, sqlupgrade returns informational messages as it checks the old server. You must fix all reported problems, and run sqlupgrade cleanly before beginning the upgrade process. Once the old server is eligible for upgrade, sqlupgrade shuts down the old server, starts the new server against the existing databases, and begins the upgrade process.