IQ Bot upgrade options

This topic gives you options and use cases in a customer environment to try a version of IQ Bot before upgrading the existing IQ Bot servers to development and production environments.

Prerequisites

The following are primary tools/processes involved:
  1. Import/Export
    • This is an IQ Bot feature.
    • We recommend transferring staging data from one IQ Bot installation to the other, provided both belong to the same IQ Bot version.
  2. Database backup/Restore
    • This is an SQL server feature.
    • Creates backup of existing database that could be restored on same or different SQL server instances.
    • Prepare a database replica of the development environment.
      • Backup all IQ Bot databases.
      • Restore the backups on a new database server.
    • Install the latest IQ Bot setup on or against the restored database server.
    • This ensures you have the latest IQ Bot server for trial purposes that uses existing development server data.
      Note: If any existing learning instances use Tesseract OCR v3, you should plan to train with alternative OCRs (Optical Character Readers), including Tesseract4 OCR before any upgrade.
Note: The task creates two development environments:
  1. Development-old: with an older version of IQ Bot (which we will address as Dev-old)
  2. Development-new: with a newer version of IQ Bot (which we will address as Dev-new)

Use the scenarios primarily where active development (such as, training of groups/bots) continues along with the trial of new IQ Bot versions.

Procedure

  1. Scenario 1: Active development happens on Dev-old environment only.
    • Continue trial/use of Dev-new, though we are not concerned about the data on this machine.
    • At the end of trial, if satisfied with new IQ Bot version then:
      1. Discard Dev-new, as it has trial data only.
      2. Upgrade Dev-old by first uninstalling older version of IQ Bot and then installing the new version on it.
  2. Scenario 2: Active development happens on Dev-new only.
    • Stop using Dev-old. All new development happens in Dev-new environment only.
    • At the end of trial, if satisfied with new IQ Bot version then:
      1. Backup databases of Dev-new, and restore on Dev-old environment.
      2. Upgrade Dev-old first by uninstalling older version of IQ Bot, and then installing the new version on it.
  3. Scenario 3: Active development happens on neither Dev-old nor on Dev-new environments.
    • Stop using Dev-old. Since Dev-new environment is being used for trial only, no active development happens on it.
    • At end of trial, if we are satisfied with the new IQ Bot version then:
      1. Discard Dev-new environment, as it has just trial data.
      2. Upgrade Dev-old environment by first uninstalling the older IQ Bot version, and then installing the new one.
  4. Scenario 4: Active development happens on both Dev-old and Dev-new environments.
    • We intend to do active development on both the (Dev-old and Dev-new) environments.
      Note: We cannot merge training from two different IQ Bot servers.
    • We do not recommend doing active development on both the environments. Instead pick either scenario 1 or scenario 2.

Next steps

When transferring data from development to the production environment, do the following:
First upgrade the production server by uninstalling the current installed version of IQ Bot, and then installing the new version of IQ Bot. This ensures that both development and production servers have the same IQ Bot version.
Migrate the data from development server to production server using import/export (standard IQ Bot process) operation.