Upgrade OpenMetadata

In this guide, you will find all the necessary information to safely upgrade your OpenMetadata instance to 1.4.x.

Prerequisites

Everytime that you plan on upgrading OpenMetadata to a newer version, make sure to go over all these steps:

Backup your Metadata

Before upgrading your OpenMetadata version we strongly recommend backing up the metadata.

The source of truth is stored in the underlying database (MySQL and Postgres supported). During each version upgrade there is a database migration process that needs to run. It will directly attack your database and update the shape of the data to the newest OpenMetadata release.

It is important that we backup the data because if we face any unexpected issues during the upgrade process, you will be able to get back to the previous version without any loss.

Since version 1.4.0, OpenMetadata encourages using the builtin-tools for creating logical backups of the metadata:

• mysqldump for MySQL
• pg_dump for Postgres

For PROD deployment we recommend users to rely on cloud services for their databases, be it AWS RDS, Azure SQL or GCP Cloud SQL.

If you're a user of these services, you can leverage their backup capabilities directly:

• Creating a DB snapshot in AWS
• Backup and restore in Azure MySQL
• About GCP Cloud SQL backup

You can refer to the following guide to get more details about the backup and restore:

Update sort_buffer_size (MySQL) or work_mem (Postgres)

Before running the migrations, it is important to update these parameters to ensure there are no runtime errors. A safe value would be setting them to 20MB.

If using MySQL

You can update it via SQL (note that it will reset after the server restarts):

To make the configuration persistent, you'd need to navigate to your MySQL Server install directory and update the my.ini or my.cnf files with sort_buffer_size = 20971520.

If using RDS, you will need to update your instance's Parameter Group to include the above change.

If using Postgres

You can update it via SQL (not that it will reset after the server restarts):

To make the configuration persistent, you'll need to update the postgresql.conf file with work_mem = 20MB.

If using RDS, you will need to update your instance's Parameter Group to include the above change.

Note that this value would depend on the size of your query_entity table. If you still see Out of Sort Memory Errors during the migration after bumping this value, you can increase them further.

After the migration is finished, you can revert this changes.

Backward Incompatible Changes

1.4.0

Tooling

• Metadata Backup & Restore: The Metadata Backup/Recovery has been deprecated, and no further support will be provided. Users are advised to use database-native tools to back up data and store it in their object store for recovery. You can check the docs for more information.
• Metadata Docker CLI: For the past releases, we have been updating the documentation to point users to directly run the docker quickstart with the docker compose files in the release page (docs). In this release, we're completely removing the support for metadata docker.
• bootstrap_storage.sh: We have deprecated bootstrap/bootstrap_storage.sh and replaced it with bootstrap/openmetadata-ops.sh. The documentation has been updated accordingly.

UI

• Activity Feed: The Activity Feed has been improved with new, updated cards that display critical information such as data quality test case updates, descriptions, tag updates, or asset removal.
• Lineage: The Expand All button has been removed. A new Layers button is introduced in the bottom left corner. With the Layers button, you can add Column Level Lineage or Data Observability details to your Lineage view.
• View Definition: View Definition is now renamed to Schema Definition
• Glossary: Adding Glossary Term view has been improved. Now, we show glossary terms hierarchically, enabling a better understanding of how the terms are set up while labeling a table or dashboard.
• Classifications: users can set it to be mutually exclusive only at the time of creation. Once created, you cannot change it back to mutually non-exclusive or vice versa. This is to prevent conflicts between adding multiple tags that belong to the same classification and later turning the mutually exclusive flag back to true.

API

• View Definition: Table Schema's ViewDefinition is now renamed to SchemaDefinition to capture Tables' Create Schema.
• Bulk Import: Bulk Import API now creates entities if they are not present during the import.
• Test Suites: Table's TestSuite is migrated to an EntityReference. Previously it used to store entire payload of TestSuite.

Upgrade your installation

Once your metadata is safe, follow the required upgrade instructions based on your environment:

Post-Upgrade Steps

Reindex

Go to Settings -> Applications -> Search Indexing

Reindex

Click on Run Now.

In the configuration section, you can select the entities you want to reindex.

Reindex

Since this is required after the upgrade, we want to reindex All the entities.

(Optional) Update your OpenMetadata Ingestion Client

If you are running the ingestion workflows externally or using a custom Airflow installation, you need to make sure that the Python Client you use is aligned with the OpenMetadata server version.

For example, if you are upgrading the server to the version x.y.z, you will need to update your client with

The plugin parameter is a list of the sources that we want to ingest. An example would look like this openmetadata-ingestion[mysql,snowflake,s3]==1.2.0. You will find specific instructions for each connector here.

Moreover, if working with your own Airflow deployment - not the openmetadata-ingestion image - you will need to upgrade as well the openmetadata-managed-apis version:

Re Deploy Ingestion Pipelines

Go to Settings -> {service entity} -> Pipelines

Re-deploy

Select the pipelines you want to Re Deploy click Re Deploy.

If you are seeing broken dags select all the pipelines from all the services and re deploy the pipelines.

Openmetadata-ops Script

Overview

The openmetadata-ops script is designed to manage and migrate databases and search indexes, reindex existing data into Elastic Search or OpenSearch, and redeploy service pipelines.

Usage

Commands

• analyze-tables

Migrates secrets from the database to the configured Secrets Manager. Note that this command does not support migrating between external Secrets Managers.

• changelog

Prints the change log of database migration.

• check-connection

Checks if a connection can be successfully obtained for the target database.

• deploy-pipelines

Deploys all the service pipelines.

• drop-create

Deletes any tables in the configured database and creates new tables based on the current version of OpenMetadata. This command also re-creates the search indexes.

• info

Shows the list of migrations applied and the pending migrations waiting to be applied on the target database.

• migrate

Migrates the OpenMetadata database schema and search index mappings.

• migrate-secrets

Migrates secrets from the database to the configured Secrets Manager. Note that this command does not support migrating between external Secrets Managers.

• reindex

Reindexes data into the search engine from the command line.

• repair

Repairs the DATABASE_CHANGE_LOG table, which is used to track all the migrations on the target database. This involves removing entries for the failed migrations and updating the checksum of migrations already applied on the target database.

• validate

Checks if all the migrations have been applied on the target database.

Examples

Display Help To display the help message:

Migrate Database Schema

To migrate the database schema and search index mappings:

Reindex Data

To reindex data into the search engine: