WebCrossing Server Maintenance Upgrade

The purpose of this update is to make it easier for large sites to do a database repack offline without worrying about a live server’s daily backup interfering in the meanwhile. The new feature is a “suspend backups for 10 days” option to ensure the roll-forward file keeps on growing until the repack is done.

This is rather technical. Please bear with me as I explain!

Regular maintenance of large databases is highly recommended. One maintenance activity is “repacking” – a procedure which can substantially reduce the size of a database by reclaiming space no longer in use. While a certain amount of database re-use occurs automatically, repacking actually helps reducethe total size of the database. 

Repacking can be done offline on a separate server, to avoid impacting on the live server process. During repacking it is best to suspend daily backups. When repacking is completed, you can then update your server with the repacked database and it will include transactions which occurred during the repack by reading in the roll-forward filing containing those transactions. So it’s important to ensure that your roll-forward transactions continue to get recording normally until the last step. 

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, but are interested in doing a repack of your large database then please contact support and we will help you if you have an up-to-date maintenance agreement or are hosted in one of our data centers.

The latest release version is now WebCrossing 6.4-1348 2019-02-18.

All self-hosted customers with valid support and maintenance contracts can download this new version at no cost.

If you are a self-hosted customer and have a valid support and maintenance contract, please contact support for access to the new server. If your support and maintenance contract has expired, please contact us to renew so we can provide you with this important update.