Implementation Plan

We are planning to implement TWO system upgrades, in sequence. We want to treat each seperatly as Phase 1 and Phase 2.

Please use the Naming_Scheme at the bottom of this section as a key for explaining unknown terms.

1. Establish two seperate environments: ‘phase 1 production’ and ‘phase 1 test’
2. Oracle Address space creation by a DBA for our test environment
3. ‘Phase 1 test’ environment will contain mostly the single flat table that currently exists
   1. Create the tables 1)
   2. Copy the MS Access database and work on the copied version for setup and testing below.
   3. Setup any ODBC table links needed
   4. Discover PHP feasibility
      1. Meeting setup with php administrator 4/27/2006
      2. Note: working on scripts for populating oracle tables.
      3. Feedback from meeting will allow php implementation and testing of grad_fac subset(s)
   5. Populate data into table
      1. This proved very very hard and annoying. Data types, masks, etc are very different between Access and Oracle
      2. Original table and the table you are populating to need to be as similar as possible in datatypes. No booleans, make them one char char/text, get number formats same, make lengths and precisions the same.
      3. Copy and paste large chunks of rows (200 at a time?) from the original access table to an ODBC linked table, all within the Microsoft Access program. Make sure to ‘Paste Append’ when pasting the second or more time around. Try smaller chunks of rows if you get errors or get kicked out.
   6. Basic testing of the ‘phase 1 production’ environment by running existsing reports, forms, etc.
   7. Quick User testing
4. Automatic web faculty listing is to be done via php code that is imbedded inside a webpage; each view of the page will be a live view of the database
   1. Discover what data is needed and list the table and field locations out
   2. Create a test page that gets live data from the ‘phase 1 test’ database
   3. Create a single test page that queries the entire listing of faculty and outputs them on one big .html page
   4. Divide the pages into sub pages so that each is a different letter of the alphabet
   5. Test the pages thouroghly, on different browsers, platforms, etc
5. Go live
   1. Halt operations on ‘phase 1 production’ system
   2. Populate ‘phase 1 test’ system with ‘phase 1 production’ system data
   3. Do a quick test of system working through Access
   4. Do a quick test of system working through web faculty listing
   5. Switch all users to ‘phase 1 test’ system
6. ‘Phase 1 test’ system is now the current production system. Once phase 2 starts, it will also be the ‘phase 2 production’ system

1. Establish two seperate environments: ‘phase 2 production’ and ‘phase 2 test’
2. Oracle Address space creation by a DBA for the ‘phase 2 test’ environment
3. ‘Phase 2 test’ environment will contain multiple tables with the same data; It will be implemented step by step, testing at each step
   1. Initialize table defintions step by step, testing that each table works with each other and constraints are functioning
   2. Populate fake data into tables, performing test queries of our own to make sure they respond correctly
   3. Develop reports, forms, etc to work with new data architecture; Base them off of the existing access reports, etc
   4. Test the system with ‘phase 2 production’ data and ‘phase 2 production’ queries to verify working status
4. Automatic web faculty listing code references need to change to query correctly to new tables
   1. Setup test pages to do this
   2. Test the pages thouroghly, on different browsers, platforms, etc
5. User testing of complete ‘phase 2 test’ system
6. Train users if anything has changed
7. Go live
   1. Halt operations on ‘phase 2 production’
   2. Populate ‘phase 2 test’ system with ‘phase 2 production’ system data
   3. Do a quick test of system working through Access
   4. Do a quick test of system working through web faculty listing
   5. Switch all users to ‘phase 2 test’ system
8. ‘Phase 2 test’ system is now the (permanent) ‘production’ system.

‘production’: This is the current system that is considered to be production at the time; It will change many times throughout the implementation.

‘phase 1 production’: This is the original, all MS Access database system.

‘phase 1 test’: This is the first Oracle database system that simply brings the single table over in the same format.

‘phase 2 production’: This is the outcome of the phase 1 test; It will be the ‘production’ system for some time.

‘phase 2 test’: This is the final test system which is also based on Oracle; We will be splitting the single table into many and contain the same data.