Enterprise software upgrades can often be a mixed bag — companies want the features, but they want the glide path to those features to be friction free. Suffice it to say, that is not always reality.

When prepping for our customer panel for the MarkLogic Summit in New York I asked my three panelists to tell me if there was a question I had forgotten to ask and Zynx Health’s Sanjay Anand piped up with “ask us about the risk of upgrade!” He noted that every company questions whether it is worth the stress and pain of upgrading — and affirmed that his company, which had been playing with MarkLogic 7′s Early Access since June, was quite anxious to have access to the full release.

The upgrade question became a staple at all three Summits, and answers ranged from “if we could get it today we would” to “we don’t want to lose any momentum on the semantics, so are planning right away.” The iconic upgrade story is the BBC, which needed some functionality found in MarkLogic 5 and so decided to upgrade within a month of the Summer Olympics. When our new-to-the-job CEO Gary Bloom found out, he was completely against it. “You don’t do an upgrade before the Olympics.” He wanted to avoid the nightmares of the IBM Atlanta Olympics fiasco. But his fears were unfounded, which Mike Bowers, Principal Engineer, Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints, could have assured him.

“MarkLogic upgrades beautifully,” said Bowers. More colorfully he added how his own team is getting perhaps a bit nonchalant. “We have 80 clusters and 300 instances of MarkLogic,” he explained. “When my guys upgrade they do run a dry run, and a few heuristics — and go to live. I do get assurances that we do it on dev first!”

MarkLogic 7 was released last week.

Jonesing to Upgrade to ML7 from MarkLogic.