Downgrading from Alfresco Enterprise to Alfresco Community

Question

We’re thinking about downgrading our Alfresco Enterprise 3.4.1 to Alfresco Community.

I’m used to Alfresco Enterprise, but I have no experience with Community version.

We’re using EMC, Alfresco Explorer and our own development based on Web Services API and Foundation API.

I’m worried about database migration. Could I simply configure Alfresco Community 3.4.e to use our Oracle Database for Alfresco Enterprise 3.4.1? Is the schema compatible for both Community and Enterprise distributions? Which version of Alfresco Community should I use? 3.4.e? What is the downgrade path between distributions? Is there any kind of correspondence between versions of both distributions?

Any downgrade experience, guide or any related information will be welcomed.

Answer 1

The Alfresco Community Edition is open source, and works with a fully open source stack. Your DB options are PostGreSQL (recommended) or MySQL.

Alfresco Enterprise supports the open source databases that Community supports, PostGreSQL and MySQL, as well as a few proprietary databases too. You can look at the Database Configuration page for more information. Support for Oracle databases is only available in Enterprise.

If you want to keep paying Oracle all that money for your database licenses, then you'll need to continue to pay a tiny fraction of that cost to Alfresco for an Enterprise License. Community, being open source, only supports a fully open source stack, so you can't use Community with your uber expensive proprietary database!

If you were using an open source database like PostGreSQL or MySQL, then you might be able to do the switch as part of an upgrade. Enterprise Service Packs (eg 3.4.1) are normally newer than the equivalent community release from that series (Community gets the bug fixes on Head). Moving from a 3.4.x enterprise service pack back to a 3.4 community wouldn't be recommended, but moving from 3.4.x enterprise to a 4.x community might work. However, that's not a tested migration path, so you could well be on your own... Alfresco QA tests community -> newer community, enterprise -> newer enterprise, and community upgrading to enterprise, which are the supported paths.