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Revise rolling upgrade guide - #599

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hammerhead merged 3 commits into
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hammerhead/upgrade
Aug 14, 2026
Merged

Revise rolling upgrade guide#599
hammerhead merged 3 commits into
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hammerhead/upgrade

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@hammerhead

@hammerhead hammerhead commented Jul 16, 2026

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We received feedback that the rolling upgrade guide was hard to follow for new users who aren't familiar yet with distributed systems. While the overall upgrade process was documented well before, there were the following issues:

  • Step-by-step instructions were interrupted by lengthy educational background information on certain parameters and their implications, causing a loss of focus. Now: Focus on the flow with default settings, elaborate on possible deviations separately.
  • Added an initial health check to ensure the cluster is green before starting
  • Removed a warning that upgrades aren't possible from "testing versions". This is not applicable if we understand "testing versions" as the testing channel, which are regular releases. It may have targeted nightly builds, but those aren't supported anyway.
  • Some of the SQL statements were outdated, querying _node instead of node from sys.shards, and also unnecessarily limiting their result to the schemas doc and blob.
  • There was an incorrect statement about writes only succeeding if a quorum of shards are present, contradicting the documentation of write.wait-for-active-shards
  • Replaced the outdated system command with modern systemctl in examples
  • The "Repeat" step was inconsistent, asking to issue SET GLOBAL TRANSIENT "cluster.routing.allocation.enable" = 'new_primaries'; after upgrading every single node, even though it wasn't reset
  • Added a post-upgrade health check to see if everything is back to green
  • Provided clearer guidance when to use min_availability options full, none, or primaries

Pending clarifications

Preview

https://cratedb-guide--599.org.readthedocs.build/admin/upgrade/rolling.html

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@hammerhead
hammerhead force-pushed the hammerhead/upgrade branch 3 times, most recently from 42785b2 to 4ba327e Compare July 16, 2026 13:55
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hammerhead marked this pull request as ready for review July 16, 2026 14:14
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hammerhead requested a review from karynzv July 17, 2026 12:09
Comment thread docs/admin/upgrade/rolling.md Outdated
@karynzv

karynzv commented Jul 21, 2026

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The warning mentioned below has been removed. Should we keep it? Also, maybe add a comment for nightly versions as well, something like "There's no guarantee that updating from nightly to another version, be that a new nightly or a testing/stable version works."

Rolling upgrades are only possible if you are using a stable version of CrateDB. If you are upgrading to a testing version you must perform a full cluster restart.

@hammerhead

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As mentioned in the PR's description, the term "testing versions" is unclear and the statement about rolling upgrades not working appears too general. If there is a release with particularities around upgrading, it would usually be mentioned in the corresponding release notes. That applies to both testing and stable versions. A warning to check release notes is already included.

We currently don't mention nightly builds anywhere in the documentation (only cloud touches on it). Even the tarball installation instructions point straight to regular releases. Hence my tendency to ignore it here as well to keep the guide focused.

Removed a warning that upgrades aren't possible from "testing versions". This is not applicable if we understand "testing versions" as the testing channel, which are regular releases. It may have targeted nightly builds, but those aren't supported anyway.

Mostly restructuring, separating step-by-step instructions from background knowledge about configuration parameters.
@hammerhead
hammerhead merged commit 822e015 into main Aug 14, 2026
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@hammerhead
hammerhead deleted the hammerhead/upgrade branch August 14, 2026 10:40
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2 participants