Upgrading OpenDental

[lennox]

Hello, all.

I am upgrading opendental from v7.0.11 to v17.3.xx. I know, I know.... it's been a looong time. But OD has been awesome for a while, and if it aint broke, don't fix it

I compiled OD and installed it on a test machine outside of the clinic running stock MySQL v5.7. Everything went well on the conversion of a backup of the database. I played around with the software and had no problems. I came to the office today to upgrade the live system, and started by creating a backup of the database and doing a test-run on that backup on the live server. The live server is out-of-date, using MySQL v5.1. This is because the old ODv7.0 used to complain when I tried to upgrade past that.

After installing, I got a warning that I needed to upgrade Mysql to v5.5 from the OD website installation or face periodic crashes.

My question is this: Is it really necessary to use v5.5 from the OD website? If I upgrade to mysql v5.7 from the Mysql website will I see any problems. I didn't get any warning on my tests at home, nor see any crashes. However, I don't want the staff to have any problems in the production environment and my home tests are far from exhaustive. On the other hand, I much prefer to upgrade to the most recent version for security reasons if that is possible.

I am going to put the upgrade on hold until I get some feedback here as ODv7 has been rock solid for them up to now, and I want to make sure I don't introduce any problems before I move forward with the installation.

Thanks in advance for your assistance... and thanks for your hard work making this incredible software!

Regards,

Lennox

[rhaber123]

Few years ago , I upgraded from OD V7 to V14, but was done by OD staff, and I was told that the newer versions have different tables, and you can not upgrade your database from v7 to v14 in one time, so they had to upgrade to v11, and then upgrade to v14.

ALL OD compiled versions are missing the CDT codes, and the ADA forms, as they are copyrighted, and OD bought a license to distribute them in their paid versions. They can not provide these in the free compiled versions. So TRY to print an insurance claim first and see what happen.
You will need to import the CDT codes / file from your old open dental folder, and you will need to import the ADA form too.
OD website has information about it.

The same, all the new compiled versions are missing many of the new E-services.

It will be better if you will contact OD support , and let them do it for you.
You will need to go back on support, pay the monthly fee for a minimum of 3 months ,
used to be $99/month for existing returning old customers with a valid license( must be checked with OD) AND LET THEM DO IT
OD Support are worth every penny you pay them. They are professional and very knowledgeable.
Probably you can do it, but you don't want your staff to have a problem on Monday

[lennox]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I've installed a test version for the Doctor to play with -- she loves it so far. I copied the A-Z folder and updated the database, and it all seemed to go well. The DB update walked through each version upgrade as far as I could tell. I had to re-start opendental 2-3 times to get the database fully upgraded... not due to failures, but each time I started it did a new update of some sort. First conversion, then something else, and finally table review and repair.

As far as I can tell, the database seems intact. Of course, with 11 years of data there's no way to be absolutely sure

I have used them before a few times -- first to get started, and another time to repair a database and you are right, they are well worth it. I also almost went to a paid version when medicaid changed, but we didn't have enough medicaid work to warrant the change after walking through what it would take to update at the time. Still, I've always been very impressed with them and never regretted what I spent But I've also got some hooks into the database that I worry I wouldn't be able to make in the future if I went with a paid version.

As for the online services, the doctor is not too keen on most of those, so we are ok with the base software for now.

Thanks again for the quick reply, I'll keep monitoring her testing and upgrade next week if it all looks good and no one from opendental points out some potentially disastrous issues.

[lennox]

I've actually done a quick check that is a bit disturbing. The MySQL backup file from ODv7/MySQLv5.1 was 150M. the MySQL backup file fromODv17/MySQLv5.7 is 40Mb. Does this sound reasonable?

I haven't seen any differences in the actual data to warrant concern, but that is a huge difference in file size. Annual income and production since we opened, # patients, etc all seem to be the same. I'll do some more checking, but I cannot find any missing data. Still... the vast difference in mysqldump size is striking, and a bit concerning.

Thanks again,

Lennox

[rhaber123]

The MYSQL file contain the "data " folder, where you have the "opendental" folder that contains the data.

in V7, you may have additional "opendental" folders if you have made some backup in the past, that is why probably the size is larger
What you need to compare is the size of the "opendental" folder in both of the MYSQ versions.

Open the MySQL folder in each version and look for the "opendental" folder.
if there is a big difference in size, than something is not right, you may need to contact OD

[lennox]

RHaber,

Thanks for the help. I actually took a great deal of time last night comparing the updated vs original database and everything looks ok there. In fact, I found quite alot of data that's smaller, but overall the database is significantly larger.

Note: I was not looking at the data directory since backing that up is not a reliable way of backing up the live database. I was looking at the size of mysqldump file I use for backing up the database off-server.

What I did find was:

a) There are a few tables that are eliminated that were fairly large. Not patient data, but OD data likely stored another way -- like "signal" which had 190k records and is now gone.
b) most of the other tables that exist in both old and new have the same record count, which is very comforting. Those that changes seemed to be config tables primarily, which makes sense, and the insurance plan tables which also makes sense since the old OD stored the plans in a different way.
c) And most notably, I am an idiot The tiny size of the dump file was because I didn't check the backup error log. There's a new table called documentmisc that stores very large files as a BLOB... something I typically wouldn't do. Because those files can be very large, I had to increase the max size of an insertion to accommodate the largest of those. So changing the max size to 512M did the trick, and I was able to dump the entire database. This time, I tested the re-insertion to make sure there were no problems.

The doctor/wife is pushing me to move this one to the live server as she likes alot of the newer features. I think I'll hold her off until next weekend at least after letting her play with it some more and hopefully hearing from some of the development staff. However, the conversion looks good and we haven't seen any problems with running on the test server so far with MySQL 5.7.20.

Thanks again

Lennox

[cmcgehee]

To answer your question about MySQL, you may use the installer directly from MySQL's website. The reason why we warn against that is because it is more likely to be misconfigured if you don't use Open Dental's installer for MySQL. If you are skilled in running a MySQL server, then you should be fine using the installer from MySQL's website. Regarding MySQL 5.7, we cannot guarantee that it will not cause problems with Open Dental. We have done little testing with 5.7 so there might be places in the program that run a query that is no longer valid. We do have a few customers using 5.7, but we do not officially support it. We do support 5.6 and have much more experience with it.

[lennox]

Thanks,

We saw no problems to date, so I updated the live installation. All seems well with the database, and the doctor is very happy with the new system.

Thanks again

Lennox