Upgrading Vertica

I have been tasked with upgrading our 7.0.1 installations to 7.0.2 so I thought I would document the process.  I'm going to give the unabridged version of the upgrade steps, please refer to my previous posts [[Installing Vertica 7|here]] and [[Vertica Installation Prereqs|here]] that should fill in the gaps if anything is unclear.  If you are not sure what version of Vertica you are running you can run select version().  

1. Download Vertica 7.0.2.1 (which is the latest CE as of this writing) from my.vertica.com.  You will need to do this from your laptop.  wget and curl likely won't work.  
2. Copy the .deb file (assuming Ubuntu) to your sudoer's (root or equivalent) home directory.  Here's an example command using pscp: pscp <location of .deb file> <user>@<ip>:<path on ubuntu>
3. Take a backup.  
4. Plan for 2-4x as much catalog space as you currently utilize during an upgrade.  du -h /home/dbadmin/<db>/<node>_catalog/Catalog.  
5. Find the options you used when you last installed or upgraded Vertica.  nano /opt/vertica/config/admintools.conf.  Search for "install_opts" which will detail the options you used previously.   This is an important step...if you accidentally choose a different set of options when you upgrade then you may find that Vertica stops working due to mismatched components.  Note the install_opts for later.  You do not need to note the -s or --hosts parameters (more on why later).  

Upgrade Process

1. As dbadmin, stop the database.  One way is the following:  /opt/vertica/bin/admintools --tool stop_db -d VMart -p <password> 
2. As a sudoer, from any host in the cluster run the new .deb file (Vertica will take care of ensuring it is copied and installed to every other host for you):  sudo dpkg -i /home/dbadmin/<file>.deb 
3. As a sudoer, run update_vertica with the install_opts noted earlier, substituting the new .deb name for the old one.  You do not need to pass the --hosts or -s parameters...those are automatically determined by the installer based on the current hosts in the cluster, which may differ from the hosts that existed when you last installed/upgraded Vertica.  Here's an example command:  sudo /opt/vertica/sbin/update_vertica --hosts <IPs> --deb /home/<deb file> -L CE -accept-eula
4. As dbadmin, start your database /opt/vertica/bin/admintools --tool start_db -d VMart -p <password>

Similar to SQL Server, a database is upgraded when it is first started in Vertica...so expect the initial startup to take a bit longer than normal.  Remember, this needs to upgrade the data files and catalog on ALL nodes in your cluster.  At this point you may want to verify that you actually DID upgrade your database...note that my db is now reporting 7.0.2-1.  

Now would be a good time to take another backup.  

Additional Notes

If you encounter errors that you feel you can safely skip then you can always use the --failure-threshold option.  I recently wrote a blog post on this.  

Lastly, you may have to upgrade supporting packages as well, such as MC.  Check your documentation.  

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