Hi!
I frequently see users running into various problems after upgrading MariaDB and starting the upgraded mariadbd server:
- Server might refuse to start, asking users to manually run mariadb-upgrade - Server might start, but misbehave as on-disk data format for regular tables or the system tables has not updated - On systems where mariadb-upgrade runs automatically on MariaDB service startup there might be unnecessary delay if mariadb-upgrade is run multiple times - If running mariadb-upgrade fails or is slow, users might end up in a situation where they re-restart the server and have two mariadb-upgrade scripts running and blocking each other - In some cases user might attempt to run mariadb-upgrade but it fails it the MariaDB server was not running, forcing user to figure out how to manually start the server for upgrades - Users might end up starting server in a mode that does not accept connections with the intent to only run mariadb-upgrade, but then don't understand they need to restart the server to have it serve connections again - Users planning upgrades get confused because because reading about Fedora based distros the DBA is requires to manually run mariadb-upgrade themselves, and reading about Debian based distros DBAs are not required to do this as it is automatic, but they might end up trying to run it manually anyway because of prior experience with Fedora
Some of the above issues can be remediated by running 'mariadb_upgrade --check-if-upgrade-is-needed' before actually running mariadb_upgrade in service scripts, but it does not work if server is offline (https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-27636). Making users aware that their database is running but mariadb-upgrade has not run can be done via https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/2464. However this are just duct tape to the original problem.
All of the above could be permanently solved if mariadbd simply did the upgrade by itself automatically.
Can we please have this?
Can we agree that this would be a desired feature in next MariaDB 11.x version, and if somebody implements this, it would be timely reviewed and merged?
There is already design outlined at https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-30499