upgrade

Scenario: MariaDB Community Server is release every 3 months. The exact date is not known but it is typically about 2 to 3 weeks after the MySQL/Oracle CPU.

We upgrade regularly customer systems, also their MariaDB Galera Cluster systems. Because we made in the past some very bad experience upgrading production MariaDB Galera Clusters short after release date we became a bit more careful. Our new policy is: We wait a few weeks before installing a new release.

Because we conduct many customers in MariaDB Galera Cluster upgrades and because these customers sometimes have pretty old MariaDB Galera Cluster set-ups I think it is good to have a rough MariaDB Galera Cluster Upgrade Path.

For an Upgrade Path we have to consider a few things:

Because upgrading from MariaDB 10.4 to MariaDB 10.5 (non-clustered) seems not to be a problem [ 1 ] we take the challenge and try to create a receipt based on the MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.4 Galera Cluster upgrade documentation [ 3 ]:

Before you start

Before you begin with the upgrade you should consider a few things:

Repositories from your favourite Linux distribution and from your favourite database software vendor get regular package updates. If you do periodic system upgrades (for example every 2 weeks as we do) you get the newest packages of a release series.
Unfortunately recently the software vendors started not only to fix bugs in new releases but also to introduce new features. And when you fix bugs or introduce new stuff new bugs might appear.

Up to version 5.5 MariaDB and MySQL can be considered as "the same" databases. The official wording at those times was "drop-in-replacement". But now we are a few years later and times and features changed. Also the official wording has slightly changed to just "compatible".
FromDual recommends that you consider MariaDB 10.3 and MySQL 8.0 as completely different database products (with some common roots) nowadays. Thus you should work and act accordingly.

Contents

• Introduction
• Character Sets
• Steps to convert Character Set to utf8mb4
  • Analyzing the Server
  • Analyzing the Application and the Clients
  • Preparation of the Server Settings and the Application
  • Convert Tables to utf8mb4

As in every quarter of the year Oracle has released yesterday its recommendation for the MySQL security updates. This is called, in Oracle terminology, Critical Patch Update (CPU) Advisory.

This CPU is published for all Oracle products. But FromDual is only interested in MySQL related topics. So let us concentrate on those.

This week, we did some migrations from MariaDB 10.0 to Percona Server 5.6 at the IT department of a big German bank.

We were perfectly aware that since version 10.0 the MariaDB code base started to diverge slightly away from the MySQL and Percona Server code base which are still pretty close to each other.

Because of the Percona Server option enforce_storage_engine we wanted to do this migration.

Table of Content

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
  • System information
  • Installed packages
  • Required packages
• Upgrade the first node
  • Upgrade the installed binaries
  • Upgrade mysql schema

A few days ago Codership announced their new version Galera v1.1 - synchronous Replication Cluster for MySQL. Before we look at the new feature of Rolling Online Schema Upgrade (OSU) we have a look at how to upgrade to the new Galera release.

The following summary shows my personal understanding of MySQL 5.1 licenses, packages and products. It does not necessarily reflect 100% the way MySQL understands it. But after all the discussions I hope it is as close as possible to the reality:

MySQL Embedded Database Server

(Download -> OEM Software)