upgradesstables is safe, but it is essentially compaction (because sstables are immutable it rewrites the sstable in the new format) so you'll want to do it when traffic is low to avoid IO issues.
upgradesstables always needs to be done between majors. While 1.1.2 -> 1.1.8 is not a major, due to an unforeseen bug in the conversion to microseconds you'll need to run upgradesstables. You can check if all of your sstables have been upgraded by looking at the file names of the sstables. Your files should be –hd– 1.1.8 will be –hf– I don't remember there being changes to cassandra.yaml between 1.1.2 -> 1.1.7 but you might want to check out a clean copy and compare your yaml to make sure some of the recommended default haven't changed or required new config options. Otherwise, nodetool drain, stop the service, upgrade to the new release, and start the service, upgradesstables Hinted Handoff should take care of anything while the node is down but if you want to be extra safe you can do a repair –pr on every node but you should be doing that on a regular basis anyways! Hope this helps. Best, michael From: Mike <mthero...@yahoo.com<mailto:mthero...@yahoo.com>> Reply-To: "user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>" <user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>> Date: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 8:15 AM To: "user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>" <user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org>> Subject: Re: Cassandra 1.1.2 -> 1.1.8 upgrade Thanks for pointing that out. Given upgradesstables can only be run on a live node, does anyone know if there is a danger of having this node in the cluster while this is being performed? Also, can anyone confirm this only needs to be done on counter counter column families, or all column families (the former makes sense, I'm just making sure). -Mike On 1/16/2013 11:08 AM, Jason Wee wrote: always check NEWS.txt for instance for cassandra 1.1.3 you need to run nodetool upgradesstables if your cf has counter. On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 11:58 PM, Mike <mthero...@yahoo.com<mailto:mthero...@yahoo.com>> wrote: Hello, We are looking to upgrade our Cassandra cluster from 1.1.2 -> 1.1.8 (or possibly 1.1.9 depending on timing). It is my understanding that rolling upgrades of Cassandra is supported, so as we upgrade our cluster, we can do so one node at a time without experiencing downtime. Has anyone had any gotchas recently that I should be aware of before performing this upgrade? In order to upgrade, is the only thing that needs to change are the JAR files? Can everything remain as-is? Thanks, -Mike
