Upgrading to a Newer Version of Ketura

Your entitlement to use Ketura is determined by the licence file provided to you by Araxis. Ketura includes a licence to evaluate Ketura for a limited period of time, after which a licence can be purchased if you wish to continue to use Ketura.

One aspect of your Ketura licence is the support expiry date. When you buy Ketura, you receive one year of support automatically. Your support expiry date can be viewed on the Licensing tab of the Administration areas page in Ketura. Your licence entitles you to install and use all versions of Ketura released on or before the Support Expires date shown there.

If your support has not yet expired

If your support has not yet expired, you are entitled to use the most recent version of Ketura available and can proceed with the upgrade process.

If your support has expired

If your support has expired, you will need to check whether the version of Ketura to which you wish to upgrade was released before your support expiry date. If it was, your licence should suffice for the new version. However, if your support expired before the new version of Ketura was released, you will need to renew your support before upgrading.

If you upgrade, and your licence does not entitle you to use the new version of Ketura, you will only be able to log on with your System Administrator account. This will enable you to log on and install a newer licence file (with a later support expiry date), once you have obtained one from Araxis.

In general the minimum system requirements for a Ketura server are not likely to change often, but you should check the requirements for the new version of Ketura before upgrading.

Each version of Ketura is designed to work with a specific version of the Ketura database design, known as the database schema version. In general, newer versions of Ketura are able automatically to upgrade databases from older versions of Ketura to the appropriate schema version (although there are exceptions). However, the converse is not true: older versions of Ketura cannot work with the databases of newer versions of Ketura.

Consequently, installing a newer version of Ketura, and thereby upgrading the Ketura database to the latest schema version, is a one-way process. Therefore, if, after upgrading, you need to revert back to the previous version of Ketura for any reason, it is imperative that you have a backup of your Ketura database that was made before the newer version of Ketura was installed. Making such a backup is also prudent, in case there is a problem during the installation of the newer Ketura version that results in the database being damaged.

Do not skip making a backup before upgrading, otherwise you might lose your data if the upgrade process fails for any reason.

For information about performing a backup, see Backing Up a Ketura System. It is strongly recommended that you follow the steps in that article for verifying your Ketura backup.

If Ketura has been configured to use Microsoft SQL Server instead of Ketura’s built-in database, please see Upgrading an existing Ketura installation configured to use SQL Server for additional information about upgrading to a newer version of Ketura.

You can now proceed with the installation of the newer version of Ketura in the same installation location as the existing version that you wish to upgrade, following the instructions in the topic Installing a Ketura Server. If prompted by the installer, choose to uninstall the existing version of Ketura.

On Windows, the Setup program will also ask you whether you wish to use the existing database, or create a new database. When asked this, be sure to click the Use Existing button, otherwise the existing Ketura database will be replaced with a new one.

Web browsers store temporary copies of certain files served by Ketura on your local hard drive. When you first visit a newly upgraded Ketura server using your web browser, these local cached copies of Ketura files are likely to be out-of-sync with the equivalents provided with the new version of Ketura. Symptoms of this include unexpected errors reported by your web browser and/or apparently ungainly or corrupted pages as you browse around Ketura. To avoid these problems, it is essential to force a refresh of these cached files in your web browser when you first visit the upgraded Ketura system.

To refresh out-of-date files cached by your browser after upgrading to a newer Ketura server:

• If you are using Safari on Mac OS X, press Command+Option+E, choose to empty the cache, then navigate to Ketura (or reload the page, if you are already there).
• If you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows, navigate to Ketura then press Ctrl+F5.