[rrd-users] rrdtool compatibility between versions 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4

[Steve Shipway]

> I am planning to upgrade rrdtool from 1.2 to 1.4 on my system. I have
> lots of statistical data collected and my idea is to use same existing
> RRD files after the upgrade; this way I would have my old data
> accessible and could append fresh data to it. So I am wondering
> whether there are any compatibility issues I should know of before
> doing migration?

RRDTool 1.4.x can correctly read and write RRD files created by RRDTool 1.2.x

RRDTool 1.0.x : Read, write, create RRD001
RRDTool 1.1.x : Read, write, create RRD002 (this was a separate fork IIRC and not really relevant)
RRDTool 1.2.x : Read, write RRD001; Read, write, create RRD003
RRDTool 1.3.x : Read, write RRD001; Read, write, create RRD003
RRDTool 1.4.x : Read, write RRD001; Read, write, create RRD003 (default); Read, write, create RRD004

RRDTool 1.4.x will by default create a type RRD003 rrd file; you only get an RRD004 if you use an MHWPREDICT type RRA or specify a smoothing_window option for a SEASONAL or DEVSEASONAL RRA (this won't happen unless you start playing with Holt-Winters data prediction).

So, there is no problem with the RRD file version, even if your RRD files were originally created by RRDTool v1.0.x

The most important thing to remember is that RRD files are architecture dependent -- so you cannot copy them between 32bit and 64bit systems, or bigendian/littleendian/middleendian (eg between windows and linux) without doing an export/import to XML.

So in summary -- you should have no compatibility problems in upgrading RRDTool from 1.2 to 1.4 if you remain on the same architecture.

If you want to test, you can always run 'rrdtool info' (using the 1.4.x vesion of rrdtool) on one of the .rrd files and check it gives no errors.

Steve

Steve Shipway
ITS Unix Services Design Lead
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Floor 1, 58 Symonds Street, Auckland
Phone: +64 (0)9 3737599 ext 86487
DDI: +64 (0)9 924 6487
Mobile: +64 (0)21 753 189
Email: s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz
 Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail 


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 4928 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.oetiker.ch/pipermail/rrd-users/attachments/20110503/7b2a3873/attachment.bin