Crash recovery

JeroenDmt · Post by **JeroenDmt** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 3:19 pm

I am currently at a site that has a serious problem:
1. The Development environment installation has been seriously messed up
2. They do not have a recent export of the DataStage jobs from this environment. They could restore the production jobs to a clean installation, but would then loose months of development work then.

They do have an xmeta DB2 repository export, and a file backup of the DataStage project-directories.

For the past weeks they have been trying (to some extend supported by IBM support) to recover the installation to a point where they would be able to connect to the DB2 repository export to be able to export the DataStage jobs in order to be able to restore those to a clean installation on a different server.
However for lots of reasons, they probably are not going to be able to achieve this.

Technically all the information of the server job designs should be kept in the repository database and/or the DataStage project directories. So theoretically it should be possible to retrieve the job design information from there, and it might not be necessary to do this through a fixed version of the messed up application installation.

My question is: is anybody aware of any options to retrieve the DataStage server job designs from the xmeta DB2 repository export plus the file backup of the DataStage jobs? Either by doing this ourselves, or through IBM or a specialist business partner that has experience with this.
Any hints are welcome. That might help us in pointing IBM Support in the right direction as well.

The IS version involved is IS 8.5

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 3:43 pm

If you restore the system backups of the projects on a system with DataStage installed, you are most of the way there.

You will need to adjust the pointers to system tables (using VERIFY.SQL) and that may be enough to allow you to export from those projects using DataStage Designer.

Those exports can be imported into projects in a clean, unbroken environment.

JeroenDmt · Post by **JeroenDmt** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 3:57 pm

Do you mean that the design information of the server jobs is still all stored on the file system, rather than in the xmeta repository? That means we would not need to do anything with the DB2 repository export for this?

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 5:36 pm

It's all stored in the local project repository.

However some of it is also stored in XMETA.

You should be able to recover the XMETA side using the SyncProject utility within ISA Lite, once you've imported from the export file.

JeroenDmt · Post by **JeroenDmt** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 11:34 pm

Is the xmeta part not needed to create the export then?
I did a few small tests on my own system, but it looked like as if what is shown in Designer for the export is depending on what is xmeta?

JeroenDmt · Post by **JeroenDmt** » Fri Jan 11, 2013 1:13 pm

We have managed to recover the job designs.

We followed the following steps:
1. Create fresh datastage installation
2. Imported xmeta repository export
3. Copied DataStage project-directory file system backups
4. Installed lastest ISALite version
5. Used the ISALite SyncProject utility to recover the projects.

After that the projects were available in DataStage Designer again and we have created the export to be imported in a new environment.

Thanks for your directions.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Fri Jan 11, 2013 3:43 pm

Well done.

Everyone should put this thread into their Favorites.