Hi there,
How will this breaking change actually affect production? Will old jobs not work any longer?
With a gradual rollout of beta18 (as it normally is), would that mean that machines that not yet have updated will be creating corrupt jobs?
How about slaves that are still on beta17, will they be able to render beta18 jobs AND beta17 jobs as well?
cheers,
l
To be more specific regarding this change, we changed the way the Tasks for jobs are stored in the Database (to increase efficiency).
Monitors on Beta 18 will not be able to see Beta 17 jobs’ Tasks (they’ll be able to see the actual jobs just fine though), and similarly, Beta 17 Monitors will not be able to see Tasks for Beta 18 jobs.
Slaves are in a similar boat, where they’ll be able to render jobs from their current version, but not the other (so either Beta 18 jobs, or Beta < 17, not both).
It shouldn’t break anything to have the two versions of Jobs in the queue, beyond having that virtual ‘split’ in Jobs. You should be able to move over your artist machines (so they’re submitting new jobs), and a chunk of Slaves while leaving some of the Slaves on Beta 17 to render out any of the older Beta 17 Jobs left in the queue. Obviously you wouldn’t want to stay in that transition period for super long, though, as it might get a little confusing over time.
Hope that clears things up!
Cheers,
Cool, thanks for the info, that explains it perfectly!
Also makes me less worried about doing the rolout now (leaving for 2 weeks vacation on monday) 
cheers,
laszlo
So to make sure we dont have straggling, never to be cleaned out beta17 jobs, should we wipe the whole repository before updating?
Im afraid that after the update (everyone being on beta18, including pulse), there will be a bunch of stuff in the db left that is just slowing things down, without us even knowing about it.
You should still be able to delete beta 17 jobs from a beta 18 Monitor, so you shouldn’t have any problems cleaning up jobs. I just tested this here to confirm.
The beta 17 tasks will still exist though, but they are stored in a separate collection in the database (the beta 17 tasks are stored in the ‘Tasks’ collection, and the beta 18 tasks are stored in the ‘JobTasks’ collection). So you could wipe that collection in a few days or so once all of your beta 17 jobs are cleaned up.
Mind you, if starting with a fresh repository/database is on the table for you guys, it definitely wouldn’t hurt. This is something we were going to recommend doing once 6.0 is officially released anyways. At this point, we can’t see us making anymore breaking changes to the database, so if you start fresh now, you shouldn’t have to worry about doing it again when 6.0 is released.
Cheers,
Ah ok, so jobs wont just go missing once someone updates, i misread Jon’s post. Thats less of a worry then
I think we will hold off with starting a fresh database till the official release, it would be a headache mid production (we dont have any periods where we could have downtime :\ )