Upgrade on Bare Metal | Official Documentation

Learn how to upgrade deployments on bare-metal infrastructure with versioning steps, rollback plans, and configuration tips.

Upgrade on Bare Metal

This guide will help you upgrade an OpenMetadata deployment using release binaries.

Prerequisites

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

Version Compatibility Matrix

Before upgrading your OpenMetadata instance, verify that the versions of the external services used in your deployment meet the minimum supported requirements. Upgrading OpenMetadata without compatible versions of these services may cause migration failures or runtime issues.

Note:

If your current deployment uses versions lower than the minimum supported versions listed above, upgrade the respective services before proceeding with the OpenMetadata upgrade process.

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.

You can learn more about how the migration process works here.

During the upgrade, please note that the backup is only for safety and should not be used to restore data to a higher version.

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:

Backup Metadata

Learn how to back up MySQL or Postgres data.

Understanding the “Running” State in OpenMetadata

In OpenMetadata, the “Running” state indicates that the OpenMetadata server has received a response from Airflow confirming that a workflow is in progress. However, if Airflow unexpectedly stops or crashes before it can send a failure status update through the Failure Callback, OpenMetadata remains unaware of the workflow’s actual state. As a result, the workflow may appear to be stuck in “Running” even though it is no longer executing.

This situation can also occur during an OpenMetadata upgrade. If an ingestion pipeline was running at the time of the upgrade and the process caused Airflow to shut down, OpenMetadata would not receive any further updates from Airflow. Consequently, the pipeline status remains “Running” indefinitely.

Expected Steps to Resolve

To resolve this issue:

• Ensure that Airflow is restarted properly after an unexpected shutdown.
• Manually update the pipeline status if necessary.
• Check Airflow logs to verify if the DAG execution was interrupted.

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):

SET GLOBAL sort_buffer_size = 20971520

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):

SET work_mem = '20MB';

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.

Enable pg_trgm Extension (Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server)

If you are using Azure Database for PostgreSQL (Flexible Server), the migration process requires the pg_trgm extension. By default, Azure restricts this extension and you may encounter:

ERROR: extension "pg_trgm" is not allow-listed for users in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Resolution Steps:

1. Allow the extension - Go to Azure Portal → PostgreSQL Flexible Server → Server Parameters → Search for azure.extensions → Add pg_trgm (comma-separated if other extensions exist)
2. Restart the PostgreSQL server for changes to take effect
3. Create the extension by running:
   CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_trgm;
   
4. Proceed with the migration

For detailed troubleshooting, see the Kubernetes Upgrade Troubleshooting section.

Requirements

This guide assumes that you have an OpenMetadata deployment that you installed and configured following the Bare Metal deployment guide.

Ready to upgrade? Continue to the Upgrade Steps for the step-by-step upgrade process and post-upgrade tasks.