How does the JIRA database upgrade process work?

Mike Soultanian December 17, 2014

Let's say I have two JIRA servers (A, B) and their two respective database servers.  I have 6.0.6 installed on A and 6.3.13 on B.  I then duplicate A's database to B's database and point JIRA B (6.3.13) to it's new database (which contains the 6.0.6 database).  When the 6.3.13 instance of JIRA sees the 6.0.6 database on its respective database server, does it just go ahead and upgrade the database?

The reason I ask is because I'm going to install a new version of 6.3.13 on a new instance and test things out on a test database (which well then have been upgraded to 6.3.13).  Then when I am ready to migrate to the new version, can I just point JIRA 6.3.13 to a production 6.0.6 replicated database and things will just start working?

 

Thanks!

Mike

1 answer

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 17, 2014

>When the 6.3.13 instance of JIRA sees the 6.0.6 database on its respective database server, does it just go ahead and upgrade the database

Yes. 

Well, that was easy wink . In reality, that answer has caveats - addons, customisations, and bugs can all break it, and badly.  But in theory, you should be able to do exactly that.  However, exactly as you say you're going to do, you really need to test it.  

Your approach is perfectly valid and it should work, but it's not the recommended approach and it is missing a step.

 The recommended approach is to run the 6.3 installer and tell it that you've got a 6.0 to upgrade.  Again, I say "in theory" because, although it should cover everything, it needs testing, every time.

The missing step if you're going to go with "install 6.3 and point it at a 6.0 database" is that you need to copy the home directory to the new installation before running it.  This is not quite as "recommended" as "run the installer", but it is very close, because the installer pretty much does the same thing in the background.

Mike Soultanian December 17, 2014

I've only done an upgrade - never a fresh install.  When I do a fresh install, is there a way for me to point it at the 6.0.3 database to tell the fresh install that it's an upgrade?

Unless I'm misunderstanding the documentation, it seems like it states to have a backup (current production) and new instance (to-be new production) and to do a fresh install on the new instance and point it to a copy of the current production database.  Then once your happy you take the new instance live and retire the old server.  So if I'm installing a fresh copy of JIRA on a new instance, it's not going to know about upgrading because there's nothing on the computer - the only way it'll "know" it's an upgrade is if there's some marker in the database that says the database was being utilized by a 6.0.3 JIRA install and needs updating...

Am I just confused? wink

Thanks!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 17, 2014

>When I do a fresh install, is there a way for me to point it at the 6.0.3 database to tell the fresh install that it's an upgrade? The bad news: No, you can't (well, without a huge amount of unnecessary mucking around) The good news: You don't need to. Your idea about the database marker is right - the database contains version data. A new version reads it and goes "Oh, I need to run upgrade-data code" And your interpretation of the documentation is right, except that you've missed the point that you really should still copy over the home directory. (Actually, skip the attachments, as that really is just copy them in order to make them available, the upgrade really doesn't need them. And you can skip the index. The upgrade is going to chuck it away and rebuild a completely new one anyway)

Mike Soultanian December 18, 2014

Ok.. I read further in the upgrade instructions and I saw what you said about copying over the home files.  I also saw some mention of copying over any other changed files, but then it's difficult to figure out which files have actually been changed.  I'm tempted to just do an in-place upgrade on the same box with a prior snapshot so that I can just update the files that the JIRA installer notices to have been changed and be done with it - the whole migrate to another box seems tedious.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 18, 2014

I don't understand why you are adding huge amounts of complexity to this. Copy the JIRA installation and the home directory. Download the more recent version. Run it and point it at the old version. It will upgrade it. If it's a standard install, you don't care about the modifications to files. If it's a non-standard install, there's a very high chance that you don't care as well. Please, just follow the standard upgrade documentation. As an admin, the 47Mb lines of code don't matter to you because the upgrade process is built to deal with it.

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Mike Soultanian December 18, 2014

OK, so that's the weird part - the upgrade documentation says to copy everything *after* you run the installer, so that's why I'm confused. Take a look: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Upgrading+JIRA+with+a+Fallback+Method So step 3.1 is a clean install. After doing the clean install, 3.2 says to copy the home folder over, and then 3.4 says to copy your existing JIRA configurations over to the new install. I don't know if any configuration files have been changed - I didn't install JIRA to begin with. I guess I'll use winmerge to compare the files listed in that section on the current and new installs and hope I catch everything. Seems like some of those files are modified by config.bat. I read some more and have a better understanding on how to handle the DB part so I get that part now. I'll create an empty db and import the XML backup data there and test it to make sure everything looks like it should. When I'm ready to do the final import, do I wipe out the new production db and reimport from a current XML backup, or do I just reimport the latest XML backup? Sorry if these are total newbie questions, but this is my first time doing a JIRA upgrade as the original install predates all of the admins at the company. We're just trying to be thorough. Obviously once I actually do it I'll probably realize it was a very simple process... it's just a bit foreign and I like to wrap my head around this so I understand all the caveats. Thanks!

Mike Soultanian December 18, 2014

Sorry, I just saw on the db portion to use the native db backup tools to make a copy and then point the new install at the copy for testing and then final migration. The instructions say to install JIRA first and then connect to the db copy afterwards as it wants you to migrate any customizations first. Should I just let the installer use the built-in db initially and then point it to the db copy, or just point it outright during the install? I didn't know if order really mattered.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 19, 2014

If you point the installer at the existing database, it willl attempt the upgrade at that point, so it will be too late to do copies etc. Working with the internal database means you'll have an empty JIRA set up and then discarded later, so it's safer and quicker, just leaves a couple of small redundent files lying around.

Mike Soultanian December 21, 2014

Cool - thanks so much for all your help. I'm being pretty slow and deliberate with this process. We're also probably going to be moving from Windows to a linux box in the near future so I'm hoping understanding all the inner workings of what's going on will help with that migration as well. Thanks!

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