This page gives general information on the prequisites for using AbaPerls, where to download, and how to install AbaPerls at a site. (AbaSec developers should beware that this page is mainly directed to the general public does not work with AbaSec. For information on installing AbaPerls on your machine, see this page.)
Contents:
Prerequisites
Installing AbaPerls at Your Site
What the Installation Consists of
Checking for Updates
Installing Updates
Before you can start using AbaPerls, you must first make sure that you have Perl installed. You also need some add-on modules to Perl.
For Perl itself, you must have version 5.8.3 or later. The simplest way to install Perl is to down ActivePerl from http://www.activestate.com. You build number should be at least 809.
You can also download the source code for Perl from
CPAN and build it yourself. In this case, you
also need three libwin32 modules: Win32::Error, Win32::Registry
and Win32::OLE. (These come with ActivePerl.) You should have version 0.1502 or later of
Win32::OLE. You can find libwin32 on
CPAN.
You also need the module Win32::SqlServer. This module is not included in
ActivePerl. This modules permits Perl to talk to MS SQL Server through OLE DB. Download
it from http://www.sommarskog.se/mssql.
You can also find it on CPAN. See the README
that comes with the module for installation
instructions.
AbaPerls should run on any version of Windows from NT4 and on. It may run to the "toy" platforms Win 95/98/ME, but don't expect me to support them. Caveat: I have not tested AbaPerls on Windows 2008. But it should work.
All SourceSafe version from VSS 5 and up should work. If you use %-signs in your site-specific files, you should stay with VSS 6.0c and earlier as later SourceSafe version disallow using % in file names. Note that AbaPerls now also permits using @ as separator for site-specific files, and that using % is deprecated.
Note that if you use VSS 2005, you have to register SSAPI.DLL to AbaPerls will not be able to access the OLE interface for SourceSafe. If you upgrade your SourceSafe version, you have to unregister the DLL first, and then re-register the new version.
(If you don't use SourceSafe as your version-control system, you can still use ABASQL and to some extent DBBUILD, but you would have to compose your update scripts by hand.)
AbaPerls supports SQL Server 2000 and later. (Previous versions have supported SQL 6.5 and SQL 7, but that support has withered.)
You need version 2.6 or later of the MDAC, or SQL Server Native Client (which comes with SQL 2005 and later). The tool DOBCP requires the command-line tool BCP is available.
There are two downloads available for AbaPerls, depending on whether you want a SourceSafe archive for AbaPerls or not. Having the SS archive gives you the advantage that you can refer to the ABAPERLS subsystem in a config-file and build it like any other subsystem, and this is the option I recommend.
To install AbaPerls with the SourceSafe archive, do this:
-> ->To install AbaPerls without the SourceSafe archive, do this:
In both cases, to verify the installation, proceed first with the next section.
There are four top directories in the installation. In the SourceSafe archive they are:
DOC – this directory includes the complete documentation for AbaPerls, including the documentation for the AbaPerls system tables.
MISC – this directory includes a few auxillary files that are referred to from the on-line documentation.
PERL – this directory contains all the AbaPerls tools. The subdirectory ABAPERLS includes Perl modules that are used by the tools.
SQL – This directory includes the files needed to install the AbaPerls system tables and their stored procedures, that is, the ABAPERLS subsystem.
The SourceSafe-less installation, also has DOC, MISC and PERL, but in place of SQL, but there is a top directory ABAPERLS which is in its turn include the SQL directory. In this installation there are also two files in the top directory: SUBSYSTEMS.LIS and SS_FILES.LIS, to faciliate running DBBUILD from this directory.
Say that you install AbaPerls in the SourceSafe database N:\SS\ABAPERLS, and on disk in P:\ABAPERLS. You should inform your users that they should:
Once you have completed this, you may want to verify your installation from a user perspective. Proceed with the document Running AbaPerls on your machine to set up AbaPerls for a user.
Provided that you read this page from your AbaPerls installation, your AbaPerls version is L1.0.0091. To see if there a newer version available, go to the AbaPerls home page on the web and compare with the version number there. To get a grip of what news there are, review the History page in the web edition of the AbaPerls manual.
There are two history pages: one compact, which is updated for each public release, and one detailed which includes about every little change in Abaperls. The compact history also includes specific update information. For generic information, see below.
Just remove the old installation (or move it a backup), and unpack the archive and the files into the same place. You can for each update choose whether you want the SourceSafe archive or the plain-files download.
Each new release will include update scripts, available in in SQL/SCRIPTS (and there will be release notes indicating which scripts to run). To get full functionality of the updated tools, you will want to run the upgrade scripts in the databases where you have installed the ABAPERLS subsystem. However, this may be quite a few, and it may not be practically possible to update all at once. Therefore, the plan is that the tools will permit the database to lag behind, so that you can run version L1.1.0001 (but maybe not L1.3.0001) of the AbaPerls tools against a database with L1.0.0009 (the first public release) of the ABAPERLS subsystem. For the exact details, you will need to read the release notes, though.