A production jira server was recently rebuilt and put into service running on the the embedded H2 database by mistake. We are planning on migrating to PostgreSQL.
But meanwhile, the site is live on H2. The support page shows:"Jira ships with a built-in database (H2) which is for evaluation only."
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-databases-compatibility-matrix-1223821024.htmlCan someone please explain what risk we're in? Is it a performance/load limit? Data integrity/corruption risk?
Thanks,
DK
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The biggest risk is that you will lose absolutely everything right now. I really do mean now, it could easily have failed why I am typing.
The damage tends to be catastrophic, not just integrity or corruption. If you imagine a database as a single file, with issues first and config data at the end, imagine what happens if you only have the first 10% of that file after a failure.
The likelihood of a failure increases on a (gentle) exponential curve against the size of the data (10,000 issues is more likely to fail than 1,000 issues, but 20,000 issues is way more than twice as likely to fail as 10,000), and the most frequent trigger of a failure is not stopping Jira properly, but there are plenty of other things that can make it fail, and many other factors that can increase the chances of failure (apps, heavy usage, trying to integrate with other systems, and and and) many of which I've never bothered to get to the bottom of.
Get a backup of it immediately and shut it down while you set it up on a proper database.
What Nic said. All the things that people are putting in Jira right now may be lost. Take it out of production fast
If you absolutely must carry on using it while you plan and build your move to a supportable system, then tighten your backup cycles.
I remember one place where I ended up amending their backup scripts so that when the current backup finished, the next one started after a 10 second pause!
I should have said this earlier though - the problems you could have are very much database only. Your Jira installation and your attachments will not be a problem.
Okay, thanks for the reply. We have since migrated to MySQL8.
I will say that if H2 is truly a ticking time bomb, then I find it a poor product design choice even for evaluation purposes. Most people are not going to "test" Jira on H2 and then throw all their data out as junk, build the real-deal with MySQL, and then start using it. They are going to start using Jira/H2 and then find it useful in soft-production and then go live, and then eventually rebuild. So the move from "test mode" to "live mode" will be gradual, making the risk of using H2 go from low to high silently.
A database has very few jobs, and reliability is top of the list. Why use H2 at all if it's so lousy in that department? If it's because it's easier to deploy, note that people use sqlite as an alternative and find it much more reliable. It's also trivial to deploy.
I would never allow my software development projects to put customer data at risk by using a product known to explode unpredictably. Maybe 50 years ago when we didn't have excellent alternatives. But not today. And preventing people from driving off a cliff is 100x better than warning them not to.
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