Upgrade to 7.4 - a long story with a happy ending

Hear y'all

A tale of a 7.3 -> 7.4 upgrade..

On Apr. 6, taking advantage of a Holiday/Corona (with two SAV21s for good
measure)
We upgraded our Prod machine (9009 41A) from 7.3 to 7.4 . + Cum PTFs
It was actually very uneventful and I took another SAV21 and went home.

On the next day though, I've found that an interface used to pull AR data
from SBO
(Sap Business One) is failing.
This is a simple interface using CLP's RUNSQL (utilizing Raz-Lee's DB-Gate
tool)
to query tables on MS SQL Server 2014.
all queries failed with "The maximum number of stacked diagnostics areas
has been exceeded".
needless to say, all these queries worked well on 7.3 .

Now, is it a problem with Raz-lee tool or IBM's ?
(you can guess what each of them said)
Anyway, after a day of debug sessions , Raz-lee's expert concluded it's an
IBM issue.
So I phoned IBM's CE (we have ETS service) and he opened a "Case"

I had my doubts but IBM certainly rose to the occasion.

ECUREP requested various logs and then provided a temp PTF that did not
solve the problem.
The process then escalated & several persons (European first and then US
based) including developers got into the picture.
What complicated matters was the fact that no hint was found in the joblog
and no dump was created.
at this point I received two temp PTF's (created for the issue) to apply so
that a dump spool file will be created , and after applying them I finally
had a dump !!

This, mind you took several days owing mainly to the timezone differences
of working hours.
But, with this dump it took the developers several hours to supply me with
a PTF
THAT SOLVED THE PROBLEM. (a big sigh of relief)
This was on Apr. 11th.

Now,
I dare say that IBM did a commendable job with this case and it is sure
reassuring to have IBM on you side.

For years, I tell my colleagues that IBM's support is superb.
This incidence is a good example therof.

Gad