MAS 90 Patch Issue

I recently decided to be brave and install a hotfix rollup/service pack to our MAS 90 4.3 install.  I believe we were on patch 3 and I would be installing patch 20.  My goal was to clear up some oddball Windows 7 issues that we were having (the exact nature of which I cannot recall unfortunately).

After installing the patch everything looked okay.  It appeared that the client upgrade was somewhat optional since it only upgraded the help files (though I did it anyway just to be sure), and when opening some of the companies in the database I got an unexpected upgrade notice (unexpected since the system was patched and not upgraded):

For all but one of the companys, getting this “Data files have not been converted for this company” message wasn’t an issue.  However for one of the companies in our database we would receive this error, go through ‘Company Maintenance’ to upgrade it, then receive a message that said that there was nothing to upgrade, but then get the “have not been converted” message again when trying to go into the database.

What was odd was that under ‘Company Maintenance’, the ‘Common Information’ module for the company was listed as version “4.09” (which so far as I know, wasn’t even a production release version of MAS 90).  Every other module in every other company was listed as “4.30”.  I am unsure as to how MAS works in the background, but when I looked at the files through a hex editor it did appear that they reporting that they were version “4.09” (however in hindsight it would appear that this value was ‘pushed in’ rather than ‘pulled out’ of the tables).  Ordinarily it would probably be worth restoring the data and trying to figure out what went wrong, but for reasons I’ll not get into the application had already been used for more than two weeks (outside of that company of course).

As luck would have it, I needed to perform some operating system tests a couple weeks earlier and had a test copy of the virtual server that hosts our MAS installation and the data was from before the upgrade.  I tried copying the tables over and a couple other little things, but after nothing worked out I decided to try and upgrade the test copy of the database to see why the upgrade to that company failed, only…it didn’t.  It worked fine.  I then copied over that copy of the company over to the production MAS.

What happened next was rather odd, but MAS is a bit of an odd product.  The version number was still reported as “4.09”, but in poking around I opened the ‘Copy’ utility under ‘Company Maintenance’ with the thought that I would copy another company’s ‘Common Information’ set over to see if the version stayed the same.  I thought better of it again (this wasn’t the first time I mulled it over) and I canceled out and then for whatever reason the version number for ‘Common Information’ was properly reported and the upgrade error went away.

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