This topic relates to vFire Core 9.2.1, released in February 2015. You may also wish to view other new features, or the release notes in full.

Enhanced Upgrade Process

Upgrading (also sometimes known as patching) your vFire Core System has previously been very time consuming for system owners. This release introduces an enhancement that will speed up this process for upgrades from 9.2.1 onwards.

The automated upgrade of a system requires a series of actions which copy physical files and run database scripts (which is the most time consuming component). In order to improve the speed of upgrading, the upgrade process has been changed so that from 9.2.1 onwards only an incremental upgrade process will run, making only the changes required by the new version and removing redundant steps in the schema upgrade in the database scripts. The result of this is that the upgrade process is faster and it is easier to see specifically what is being updated in each version.

The first time you upgrade to a 9.2 version, the current patch process will be executed to bring the system to 9.2.0 and then the incremental process will be used onwards. Upgrading from 9.0.X or 9.1.X to 9.2.1 will still take a similar time to upgrade as previous upgrades. Upgrading from 9.2.0 to 9.2.1 or any future higher version will be much faster.

File Changes

The current upgrade files are located in the Config directory (typically c:\Program Files\Alemba\vFire\System1\Config. There is now a new directory underneath the existing config directory named 9201 (for 9.2.1) for the changes to this specific version. An XML file defines how these scripts are run. There is a new (additional) file format for running scripts from the upgrade tool. Script files can either be run as an existing SCP file or as a new XML format.