In most cases, migrating to a new release of OpenEdge, particularly a minor release upgrade, can be made without running any conversion utility. It is important to test even minor release upgrades and service packs or patches in your test environment prior to promoting the code to production.
When making a major release upgrade, you need to do additional analysis prior to making any changes. Major releases require that you test the conversion process for performance and reliability prior to applying the new release to your production environment.
Generally, the actual conversion of the database will only take a few minutes, so it is not a major undertaking to convert the test environment and verify that conversion. After the verification has been done on the test database, you can decide how to proceed with the production application and databases.
You might want to do a more complex conversion if for example, you have a significant amount of record fragmentation in the database. A complex conversion might start with a simple conversion to take advantage of new features in the new release, but then you add a dump and reload of your tables to establish a new database structure. By using a multi-phase approach, you can minimize your risk and provide a fallback position if there are problems during the migration. It is imperative to have good, tested backups before applying a new release of OpenEdge or application code to the system. This is also true when applying minor releases and patches to the system.
