General Windchill Upgrade Question: what is the point of the Upgrade Manager?

[avis]

Hi I am a New Windchill User trying to Upgrade a Windchill installation from 11.2 to 12.

After reading through the upgrade documentation.

I do not understand what the Upgrade Manager does.

As I understand it, the target system needs to have the new version of Windchill installed from scratch and have the old LDAP and database imported into this new installation before the Upgrade Manager is run.

From the documentation it says that the Upgrade Manager only upgrades the Database, but I am not sure exactly what this means and what was wrong with the old database if only Windchill upgraded?

Forgive my ignorance on this.

[TomU · Accepted solution]

The 'schema', or database structure changes some with each release.  New tables and columns are added and other tables and columns are dropped.  As I understand it, the upgrade manager goes through and converts the existing database structure to whatever is needed for the new version.  The upgrade manager will also make changes to the Windchill Directory Server's ldap data.  That's why each refresh of the data from the old system requires replacing both the database and the ldap file before running the upgrade manager.  (You should also recopy any changes in the file vault as well before starting the upgrade manager.)