Hello
I’ve been working with KNIME for a while now and keeping tabs on the new updates.
We’re porting a lot of reports (some pretty extensive) from Hyperion to KNIME.
We’re extracting and manipulating a lot of data from our ERP for our daily business, so working reports and exports are crucial.
Does anyone have any experience on backwards compatibility with KNIME?
The IT person responsible for KNIME backtracked from his plan to update the AP and Business Hub regularly, now he either updates it when something breaks or “he feels like it”.
Now I’m a bit concerned that when we actually decide or have to update our workflows will break.
We’re currently still on 5.2.4 and while I can understand that updating can break things too I feel we’re missing out on a lot of new features (eg. the new Expression node, Row Filter with multiple criteria etc.).
Our IT also won’t help us with broken workflows so if they decide to “break things” by updating we’re going to be stuck with 100+ workflows not running.
Thanks
In general my understanding is that KNIME is backwards compatible.
You can specifically see this when you e.g. search in your node repository for:
row filter //deprecated
Output:
So even when nodes are “phased out” they are somewhat still “there”.
I’ve seen different models - the most successful one I have seen is where IT takes care of the infrastructure and the business upskills process experts that then take ownership of workflows… it can be a big change as a lot of managers seem hesitant to take “a leap of fate” and to hire for different skills than what they typically have in their teams whenever there is some turn over…
Sometimes center of excellence models can also work although in the long term I have not seen anyone being able to sustain or keep growing such an organisation to also be able to maintain all the tools they built (including other technologies as well here).
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Hello MartinDDDD
I will try to gently “push” our IT towards a regular update schedule.
We’re already running into issues getting help, be it ChatGPT or the forums.
We’re also pretty much on our own, our other locations aren’t even remotely using KNIME as much as we do and our IT (1 person that supports KNIME for around 200 users) is pretty much hands off.
I will try to simulate an update by exporting the workflow data and reimporting the workflow in a new version, as apparently it’s “impossible” to run 2 different KNIME versions on our remote VM.
I’m pretty sure it will work just fine but as we have KNIME exports that need to run daily 365 days a year I’d rather be safe than sorry.
Sorry for the rant but our IT is really something else.
No worries - understand it totally and not too surprised by your experience…
Regarding running two KAP versions in parallel: if VM specs permit it, download a newer version as .zip… as long as you point the new version to a different workspace you should be fine…