Since Primavera released P6 R8.4 back in October of 2014, a standalone installation of P6 Professional can use a small, simple, SQLite database.
This was an excellent change in the Primavera P6 standalone package because previously you had to either setup a Microsoft SQL Server Express database, or install the somewhat technically demanding Oracle XE database; which frankly if you’re not an Oracle DB expert, could be hard to install and maintain.
The SQLite database, however, lives up to its name. It is extremely light weight and requires almost no thought when installing and using P6 Primavera Professional.
To all intents and purposes, the SQLite database is a large .db file that is usually installed in your Document folder.
It’s a single user database, has no server or windows service, and you won’t find an app of any kind on your system after you install P6.
So then, how does one upgrade this thing with no sql scripts to run against it? You may well ask, and thankfully the answer, like SQLite, is very straightforward.
So let’s say you’ve been using your P6 Professional R8.4 as a standalone with the SQLite database; but now you’d like to install the latest version, which at the time of writing this is R16.2.
No problem. Download your latest Primavera P6 media package from the Oracle Delivery Cloud, unzip it and double click on the setup.exe file in the P6_Pro_R162 folder in there. The installer will detect the earlier version and offer to upgrade it.
Click OK and follow the instructions on the install wizard.
Once you get through all that you will be prompted to configure the database. You need to select the P6 Pro Standalone (SQLite) option here.
Next, go with the ‘Add a connection to an existing standalone database’ option.
Following that you will see this message where you can click Yes to do the upgrade.
And just seconds later, you’ll see this message.
Simple and painless – just how we project folks like it. That way we get to spend our time on project deliverables, rather than messing around with applications.