DSXchange

Hi,

Was wondering if anyone had attempted importing code from a later version of Datastage (8.X) into earlier versions.

My scenario here is that we have a month of parallel run in production - with both V8 and older V7 to do our data testing and performance testing etc. And here come some emergency fixes to code and since our developmetn and integration environments are already upgraded to new V8 - i can test my changes only there and migrate only V8 code. But in production i have both V7.5 and V8.1 and i need to migrate code to both.

when i try to import the V8.1 dsx into V7.5 it throws a warning but if i skip that warning i can probably proceed, but am wondering if that is a good idea. As an alternative i am only copy-pasting the job design from the designer browser and this works, but in general when i have more jobs to be fixed for one prod emergency, its such an overhead and room for error.. hence i seek ideas..

Thanks in advance

Chances are pretty good that this code will work at V7. Do an export at V7 into .dsx format and check the version number in the header (use your favorite editor), then edit your V8 export and change the version to that of the V7 and import it at v7. If you don't get warnings or errors during the import process or during the subsequent force compile then you can be fairly confident that it worked.
Needless to say, none of this is supported by IBM so if things do wrong your only recourse is to.... well, I don't think you have a recourse

As far as i know, whenever software gets upgraded by vendors then upward compatibility is done NOT backward compatibility

Regards
Sreeni

That is usually true, which is why the method I noted is not supported (yet will probably work).

The import format is roughly the same so the import will work. Some version 8 stages and functions will break such as the connector stages and parametset and the slowly changing dimension stage. The importer will probably turn these missing stages into a generic stage. If you take a version 7 job, change it in version 8 and don't use the version 8 new functions and the push it back into version 7 it should work although your testing wont be as robust as it should be. You wont be sure it will run in the 7 production environment until it lands there. Better to put all version 7 fixes on hold until your version 7 environment has been upgraded or find some way to have two virtual environments on the systems integration server.