Do jira change its datamodel with every upgrade?

[Vineet Kumar]

Hi All, The question directly concerns the technique i should follow for upgrading the Jira from 3x to 6x? I have already tried to load the xml backups but ended with several errors. Is there any possibility that the upgrade will not fail if i will directly point the immediate higher version (lets say 4x) to the same database which i was using for jira 3x. How different the table and colum structure will be, will jira 4x be able to reterive the data from that database?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

"Maybe" is the short answer to that question.

The shape of the data CAN change with versions, but does not always change, and the changes can be minor or vast.

But you don't really care about that, it's not important to you.

All versions of Jira contain code that can perform all the data migration needed for previous versions, so the data is irrelevant. All you need to do is upgrade as per documentation.

I don't know where you're starting, but if your 3.x is anything other than 3.13, you have more work to do because you should probably not try to take anything below 3.11 to any version of 4 or above. If you're below 3.7, you absolutely must go to 3.6 then 3.7 or 3.8, then 3.13.

Assuming you're on 3.13, I'd recommend jumping to 4.4 next, then to 6.0, then 6.3. But you'd need to test it, and possibly factor in going from 4.4 to 5.1 too.

[Tiago Comasseto]

Hi Vineet, you can follow the steps listed in this doc, which include an intermediary upgrade step to version 4.4.5 pointing directly to the 3.x database instead of using the XML backup.

As for the database structure after the upgrade, you can see details in this other doc.

Cheers