Once again, our backup generator saved us from some major problems. We lost power to the PALNI/INCOLSA Offices, including our computer room, at about 10:30am today, 8/5, and power was not restored for more than an hour. That's definitely longer than our Uninterruptible Power Supply would have been able to maintain things on battery backup power alone. If we'd lost power to the PALNI systems, PALNI Staff would no doubt still be working to recover from the problems, given given everything that was going on this morning with our Aleph upgrade.

Of course, we are now in the final stages of our Version 15 to 17 Aleph migration. This morning, Ex Libris was working to finish up applying the latest changes to our production database to the new Version 17 copy (i.e., applying the so-called Oracle "triggers"). We know from past experience that the Ex Libris conversion programs and scripts cannot be restarted if they get interrupted. They have to be re-run from the beginning, and that is a big problem if the conversion script takes a long time to run. For our Aleph upgrade, Ex Libris has been running some really long scripts that take a week or more to complete.

Had we lost power, it's entirely possible we would have lost a week or more of time in our upgrade schedule. Fortunately, however, our UPS took over instantaneously when we lost power, and then our backup generator took over within a few minutes. Everything in our computer room, including the PALNI systems, continued to run completely without interruption. As a result, we are still on target for our Aleph upgrade next Monday.