We have just installed 8.5 and are learning and testing it's capabilities. We successfully migrated very simple jobs from 8.1.2 into 8.5 and used the Oracle Connector Migration tool to convert Oracle Enterprise stages to Oracle Connector stages. It worked wonderfully and so simply.
We then decided to export the jobs from 8.5 back into our 8.1.2 project and received the follwoing error message:
File C:\User\XBNEWDV16\LDG_IMPORT_TEST.dsx does not appear to be a valid DataStage export file or is from an incompatible release.
A valid DataStage export file is expected to be in Windows format (i.e. using CRLF line terminators).
We tried XML, DSX and DSX-7 formats all without success. We have previously been able to migrate from 8.1.2 to 8.0 and visa-versa so expected the same.
8.5 is definitely not downwards compatible at all. You cannot reliably export 8.5 jobs (even with manual tweaks to the DSX or ISX) and get them to load into any prior release. If you did manually force jobs to a lower release you would be breaking the terms of your customer service contract and your support provider could refuse to provide any service on the entire DataStage system, regardless of whether an individual job had been downgraded or not.
Even at earlier releases it was risky (you had to manually strip out stages or options that weren't supported in previous releases), but now its definitely not something you should ever do.
