Committing all uncommitted hotfixes
Hi,
I have two questions regarding uncommitted hotfixes on Pega.
On our production system, almost all our hotfixes are waiting on uncommitted hotfixes list. Those are not very few... cumulated over the years....
We would like commit them as we would like to use update managers full functionality to roll back hotfixes in some cases later on.
My first question is; do we have any risk to commit them and is this procedure required and DB back up before doing that ? We know that those fixes are already running but as this in production system we would like to be sure about it especially the issue, which I will detail below, we have.
the issue we have as follows;
We have installed a cumulative patch regarding a defect on our production system. The patch covered that problem but required a corporate wide SilverLigtht update which could not be done at that moment. As a result of this, we have removed the patch by deleting the rules one by one from DB.
At the moment, we have total number of 6-7 hotfixes on production system, those can be seen on uncommitted hotfixes list, but actually no rule related with them on the system.
Considering this exceptional issue, what happens If we commit them all at once ? We think that the list will clear up, and as there are no rules about that hotfixes, system will run as it is right now ... but we would like be sure about that.
Any help, idea and support will be appreciated.
Thank you
Regards
***Edited by Moderator Marissa to update platform capability tags;; add SR Details****
Hi,
I know and totally agree how we should manage hotfixes. but in our case, there are many hotfixes installed in years and no one committed them without any reason ... probably they did not know the importance of keeping this list (uncommitted hotfixes list) clean ... I have been there at that time .. so I cant really put any more comment about that :) ... now I would like to fix this issue.
I have installed the cumulative hotfix with hotfix manager. When we see the problem on production, we couldn't rolled back as a result of other uncommitted hotfixes as they are important and working fine. There was no other option other than deleting them from DB as almost all our end users (more than 20k) were seeing similar issues ... After deletion of the rules, it was ok.
I havent check the inventory but when I try to install the same cumulative hotfix again I see that the hotfixes (those are still in the committed hotfix list) will be installed again on the "Select hotfixes and scan" page.
If you create a restore point before installing the hotfixes, you can restore to that particular point.
Which version of Pega you are using?
Also deleting the hotfixes manually is not recommended.
Did you take a DB backup before installing the new hotfixes?
We are running 7.1.7.
Yes We backed up the DB before installation and uninstallation of hotfixes.
So, It seems there would be no issue If we commit them.. but in anycase we will create a restore point & backup DB.
I don't think we can create a restore point in Pega 717 from application side so DB backup is all you have.
So you can commit all the hotfixes for now and if you face any issue, you can restore the DB to the point before installation and then commit all the hotfixes (as previous hotfixes didn't have any issue). After this you can install the new hotfixes and perform the necessary tests.
If they fail again you can simply rollback the new hotfixes.
In general your hot fix installation process should be to install a hot fix as uncommitted, test with it and then either rollback or commit the hot fix. Certainly before you install any new hot fixes you should be committed or rolling back previous ones because if you do want to rollback the newly installed one it would rollback all uncommitted hot fixes. Regardless if the hot fix is committed or uncommitted it is in use in the environment.
As for the specific question, how did you install this cumulative hot fix? Was it installed using hot fix manager and thus they are listed as uncommitted even though you have manually deleted rules? Manually deleting rules from a hot fix is not recommended as there can be dependencies that you are not aware of. If you wanted to remove the hot fix why didn't you just roll it back? Please run a new hot fix inventory report and see if the hot fixes still show as uncommitted.