Before You Upgrade

Before you upgrade the Vertica database, perform the following steps:

  • Verify that you have enough RAM available to run the upgrade. The upgrade requires approximately three times the amount of memory your database catalog uses.

    You can calculate catalog memory usage on all nodes by querying system table RESOURCE_POOL_STATUS:

    => SELECT node_name, pool_name, memory_size_kb FROM resource_pool_status WHERE pool_name = 'metadata';
  • Perform a full database backup. This precautionary measure allows you to restore the current version if the upgrade is unsuccessful.
  • Perform a backup of your grants.
  • Verify platform requirements for the new version.
  • Identify and remove unsupported projections. In all post-9.0 versions of Vertica, support has been removed for projection buddies with different SELECT and ORDER BY clauses. Support also has been removed for pre-join and range segmentation projections. If the upgrade encounters unsupported projections, is liable to fail.
  • Check catalog storage space.
  • If you use LDAPLink, check if your users and roles may be orphaned.
  • If you're upgrading from Vertica 9.2.x and have set the PasswordMinCharChange or PasswordMinLifeTime system-level security parameters, take note of their current values. You will have to set these parameters again, this time at the PROFILE-level, to reproduce your configuration. To view the current values for these parameters, run the following query:
    => SELECT parameter_name,current_value from CONFIGURATION_PARAMETERS 
    	WHERE parameter_name IN ('PasswordMinCharChange', 'PasswordMinLifeTime');

After you complete these tasks, shut down the database gracefully.