Before You Upgrade

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

  • Make sure 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 as follows:
    SELECT node_name, pool_name, memory_size_kb/1024/1024 AS memory_size_G 
       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.
  • 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.

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