Advisory regarding updating Omniscope to 2021.2

Omniscope 2021.2 comes with a new data engine, responsible for providing queryable data to power the visualisations in your reports. 

This upgrade has many improvements in robustness, diagnostics and troubleshooting, and is strongly recommended for production servers, but may need attention regarding 2 aspects when upgrading.

Audience:

• Windows and Mac desktop users should not need to take any special action when upgrading, unless using the Storage Block. 
• Production server administrators on any platform should read on and may need to take action.
• Linux server administrators will need to take action and follow this advisory in full.

1. Re-populating the data storage 

On all platforms, when you upgrade to Omniscope 2021.2, the data engine's previous stored queryable data (the "dbfarm") will be discarded for compatibility reasons, and in most cases it will be rebuilt automatically from raw execution data.  This will happen on demand when next opening the report in question, with a small delay. This will  not happen automatically only where a Storage Block is linked directly to a report.

If you wish to do this proactively after upgrading, you should click the "Refresh tables" button in Admin (see /_admin_/dataengine/), which will immediately update all report data, including the Storage Blocks. 

If you have any Storage Blocks used in production reports, you must click the "Refresh tables" button, or alternatively can refill them individually by opening the workflows in question and executing the block in "fill" mode. If you do not do either of these, reports linked directly to Storage Blocks will show an error.

2. Updating MonetDb  (Linux systems only)

Behind the scenes, Omniscope uses MonetDb, a columnar database optimised for BI queries. Omniscope 2021.2 is built to work specifically with MonetDb 11.39.17, which is a major upgrade to the previous version used by Omniscope 2021.1 and earlier. 

On Windows and Mac, this is bundled as part of Omniscope installation; you do not need to upgrade MonetDb when upgrading Omniscope. On Linux servers, you must upgrade MonetDb at the same time when upgrading Omniscope. Failure to do so may result in performance or reliability issues when upgrading Omniscope, and also when later upgrading MonetDb. 

To update MonetDb on a Linux server:

1. First, if you are installing Omniscope on a new Linux machine, you need to add Monetdb repositories by following the instructions here 

https://www.monetdb.org/Downloads  

and here  

https://help.visokio.com/support/solutions/articles/42000016081-linux-installation-2018-

1. Once the monetdb repositories are available on your system (and for existing systems being upgraded), make sure Omniscope is not running, and install monetdb using the package manager of your distribution. For example on Debian based system you can use the following command:
   sudo apt update && sudo apt install monetdb5-sql=11.39.17 monetdb5-server=11.39.17 monetdb-client=11.39.17

If you have any concerns or need help with any of this, please contact [email protected].