4th Dimension v15 has been out for a little while now, and we’ve recently been working on getting 3-4 of our 4th Dimension customers upgraded to v15 from 4D v12 or v13.  The transitions from v11 through v13 were relatively straightforward in my experience. The upgrade to v15 has been a bit more work, so if you’re planning the upgrade, I would budget more time than some of the other recent upgrades.

One strong recommendation I would make is to download and follow the upgrade guidelines, in particular the guidelines for upgrading to v14. There are some steps in the upgrade process that will cause you problems when upgrading to v15 if you skip over v14 and miss those steps.

v15 has a new journaling feature that requires unique keys in every table. The journaling feature is a more sophisticated enhancement to the log file functionality in previous versions of 4D and helps insure that you have no risk of lost data in the event of a system failure or data corruption.

If you’re like me and have the occasional table that didn’t need a primary key, the v15 converter creates one for you, or you can create it for yourself before doing the upgrade. This was the choice I made so that it was more directly under my control. You also have the option to enable journaling on a table by table basis.

The most difficult 4D upgrade I’ve worked on in a long time has been in progress for awhile now. The client had stayed at 4D version 2003 for a very long time and the complex set of steps I’ve had to put together to get it upgraded to v15 has taken a lot of time and work to develop and test. I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to get that far behind software versions when dealing with an application that is important or mission critical to your business.

If you’d like to read more about new capabilities in 4th Dimension 15, please check out the Upgrade pages.
~John Newhoff

Portage Bay Solutions is a 4D Partner (Silver) with over 25 years of 4D development experience.