2 Upgrading an Existing Oracle NoSQL Database Deployment

This section describes how to upgrade the software of your Oracle NoSQL Database deployment.

Installing new software requires that you restart each node. Depending on your store’s configuration, it is sometimes possible to upgrade while the store remains online and available to clients. Upgrading your software this way is known as a rolling upgrade. Such a strategy is useful in most cases, since downtime is undesirable.

Even if your store can support a rolling upgrade, you may want to perform an offline upgrade, which involves these steps:

1. Shutting down all nodes.
2. Installing new software on each node.
3. Restarting each node.

While an offline upgrade is a simpler process in some ways, your store is unavailable for the duration of the upgrade.

If the store's replication factor is greater than two, you can perform a rolling upgrade. With a replication factor greater than two, shards can maintain their majorities and continue reading and writing data on behalf of clients. Meanwhile, you can restart and upgrade software on each shard component, one at a time.

If the replication factor is 2 or 1, the shards cannot maintain their majorities through a node restart. This means that each shard will be unavailable while you shutdown a shard component, upgrade the software, and restart the node.