Symptoms
You have downloaded a new version of OfficeTalk and you wish to test this new version in a test environment before installing it into your live system.
Note: It is a particularly good idea to test any proposed OfficeTalk upgrade in a test environment before performing the upgrade in a production or live environment.
Detail
On your test system, perform a clean installation of OfficeTalk, ensuring that you select ASA. Then, open the Services applet in Control Panel (Administrative Tools) and stop the Adaptive SQL Anywhere – OfficeTalk service.
On your production server, locate your OfficeTalk database file: please refer to Finding the Location of your ASA Database File for more information.
Close all open OfficeTalk windows and shutdown your ASA database server (see below).
If you are running ASA 8 or ASA 9, you will see a red and yellow gradient SQL icon in the Taskbar Notification Area; double-click on this icon and click on the Shutdown button. If you don’t see the icon, then open the Services applet and then stop the Adaptive SQL Anywhere – OfficeTalk service.
If you are using ASA 5, then simply close the “OTDB” ASA 5 database server window which will be running on the session that started it (this is ordinarily minimised, but will be visible in the Taskbar).
Once you are satisfied that the database server has been stopped, copy your production database file, which you located earlier, to the newly installed test server. The database file will need to be copied to the location where the OfficeTalk server was installed, such as C:OTalk by default, overwriting the existing file if prompted to do so. If your database file is called otsqldbv4.db then rename the file to otsqldb.db. If you have any old transaction log files (otsqldb.log or otsqldbv4.log) on your test computer then delete them.
Once the ASA database file is in place on the test server, start the Adaptive SQL Anywhere – OfficeTalk service in the Services applet.
If the ASA database server does not start for any particular reason, then please refer to the FAQ: The ‘Adaptive Server Anywhere – OfficeTalk’ service does not start.
On the test computer, open OfficeTalk 4.5.x. It will prompt you to upgrade the database and will then ask for Supervisor credentials. Enter these details, the database upgrade procedure will then run. When the upgrade is complete, you will be able to log into a copy of your old database using your new version of OfficeTalk on the test system. Note, all existing OfficeTalk clients will continue to connect to the production system. Restart the ASA database server on the production server in order that the OfficeTalk clients can re-connect.