Major version upgrades can be a significant amount of work, depending on various factors. Such as:
- Incompatible changes between major versions
- Performance regressions due to changes in the engine's Query/Cost-based optimizer
- Choosing the right upgrade process that meets the requirements of your business, documenting and testing it
- Database/Application complexity and the amount of work required to perform proper testing (smoke, integration, regression and performance)
- In-flight application changes and new feature development
This project aims to help guide the world through these upgrades, particularly those on a managed service, such as Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL.
We are not looking to reproduce technical documentation, but rather:
- Provide supplemental documentation
- Aggregate existing documentation
- Summarize important dates/deadlines, particularly
In order to help create an actionable and successful plan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Regardless of the RDBMS, we've created this RDBMS major version upgrade checklist.
There will always be specifics related to the particular engine, but the goal of the checklist is to help create an actionable plan regardless of the engine.
Ideally, major version upgrades should be completed before the EOL of the engine.
Managed services, such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL will offer grace periods to perform these upgrades, and in some situations offer extended support.
Start planning and executing your upgrades as soon as possible, based on EOL dates.
Depending on the Cloud Service Provider (CSP), there will be particular deadlines, see below.
Here is a checklist that you can use as a starting point to ensure a successful upgrade