About the Siebel Upgrade Wizard and the Log Parser
As indicated at the beginning of this section, any critical database-related tasks such as creating the initial Siebel CRM tables and indices or importing the initial "seed" data are executed by the Siebel Upgrade Wizard. This wizard is a specialized software unit that can be invoked from the configuration wizard or manually from the command line.
The utility is mainly used during upgrades from previous versions of Siebel CRM to a newer version, such as when upgrading from Siebel CRM 7.7 to 8.1.1. This is a critical process and the portions of it that involve modifications to the database schema such as creating or altering tables are carried out by the Siebel Upgrade Wizard.
The following are the main actions that the Siebel Upgrade Wizard can execute against the Siebel Database:
- Initial installation of a new Siebel database (described in this chapter)
- Upgrade of an existing Siebel database to a newer version
- Apply additive schema changes as part of an upgrade
- Import the Siebel Repository metadata from a file
- Export the Siebel Repository metadata to a file
- Migrate the Siebel Repository metadata from one database to another
- Run database utilities such as conversion to multi-lingual list of values
Each of these tasks requires various input parameters such as tablespace names and user account names and passwords, which are collected by the Siebel Configuration Wizard. Once the wizard has finished collecting parameter values, it will produce a file with an .ucf suffix (upgrade configuration file) containing the parameter values.
The configuration wizard will then launch the Siebel Upgrade Wizard and pass the location of the generated .ucf file. The Siebel Upgrade Wizard will read the file and execute the task.
For each task such as installing or upgrading a Siebel database, Oracle provides so-called driver files that contain the detailed steps to carry out the tasks on a specific database platform.
The upgrade wizard will also read these driver files and create a "to-do list". It is important to understand that the Siebel Upgrade Wizard does not connect directly to the Siebel database. To do so and to execute the actions and scripts against the RDBMS, the Siebel Upgrade Wizard invokes command line utilities and programs shipped with the Siebel installer.
During the processes invoked by the Siebel Upgrade Wizard, the utilities and programs direct their log output to files in a folder specified at configuration time. These log files can be big in both amount and size. For this reason, Oracle provides a utility called Log Parser, which enables the administrator to monitor a running process or document completed (or failed) processes.
The Log Parser, implemented as the command line utility logparse.exe, which is located in the Siebel Server's BIN subdirectory, is capable of traversing the log files for a given Siebel Upgrade Wizard process and generating summary files in plain text and formatted HTML. These HTML summaries are useful for documentation and troubleshooting and provide hyperlinks to the original log files.
The following diagram depicts the dependencies between the Siebel Configuration Wizard, the Siebel Upgrade Wizard, and the Log Parser:
Now that we know how the Siebel Upgrade Wizard works, we can start the Siebel database installation process by launching the Siebel Configuration Wizard. The following table describes each step of the process:
