OceanBase Database supports cluster upgrades using upgrade scripts. The entire upgrade process is transparent to applications, and no application-side stop-and-start operations are required. OceanBase Database upgrades zones in sequence. During the upgrade, partition leaders will actively switch between zones and redirect business traffic from the zone being upgraded to other zones.
This topic describes the limitations, considerations, and upgrade paths for upgrading OceanBase Database.
Notice
OceanBase Database does not support upgrading from V4.2.x or earlier to V4.4.x.
Limitations
When you upgrade an OceanBase cluster, note the following limitations:
- DDL operations are disabled during the upgrade. They are enabled after the upgrade is completed.
- The
major freezefeature is disabled during the upgrade. It is enabled after the upgrade is completed. - Migration replication and load balancing are disabled during the upgrade.
- Physical backup and restore are disabled during the upgrade.
- You cannot create a new tenant.
Notice
If the OceanBase cluster is associated with an arbitration service, you must upgrade the arbitration service before upgrading the OceanBase cluster. For more information, see Upgrade the arbitration service.
You can query the oceanbase.DBA_OB_ARBITRATION_SERVICE view in the sys tenant to check whether the OceanBase cluster is associated with an arbitration service.
Considerations
When you upgrade an OceanBase cluster, note the following considerations:
Log archiving is disabled during the upgrade from OceanBase Database V4.0 to V4.1.
If the upgrade requires
ADD SERVER/DELETE SERVERoperations, contact technical support.You cannot directly upgrade an OceanBase Database transitional version. You must follow the upgrade version sequence specified in the
oceanbase_upgrade_dep.ymlfile.You must directly connect to the observer process that hosts the Root Service to execute the upgrade script. You cannot connect to the observer process through OceanBase Database Proxy (ODP).
The following parameters may change during the upgrade. You must back up these parameters before the upgrade:
Starting from OceanBase Database V4.3.0 Beta, OceanBase Database no longer supports the zlib_1.0 compression algorithm. During the upgrade, the following pre-checks are performed:
- The
zlibcompression algorithm is no longer supported as the value of thelog_transport_compress_funcparameter. You must replacezlibwith another compression algorithm. - If some tables use the
zlibcompression algorithm, you must replace the compression algorithm with another supported one or disable compression during the upgrade. - The
zlibcompression algorithm is no longer supported for the OBKV-Table connection. You must set thetableapi_transport_compress_funcparameter to another compression algorithm.
- The
If your cluster is based on an ARM architecture or an x86 architecture that does not support the AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2) instruction set and you have used columnstore tables (either by using columnstore tables or by converting columnstore tables to rowstore tables), you cannot upgrade from a lower version of OceanBase Database V4.3 (V4.3.0, V4.3.1, or V4.3.2) to V4.3.3 or later. This is to prevent data correctness risks after the upgrade.
When you upgrade a cluster of a lower version of OceanBase Database V4.3 (V4.3.0, V4.3.1, or V4.3.2) to a cluster of V4.3.3 or later, the standby tenant cannot parse the logs generated by the higher version cluster. In this case, an error is returned when the standby tenant submits logs (the error is not persisted). For more information about how to restore data, see Prepare for data restoration.
Tenants backed up in a cluster of OceanBase Database V4.3.2 cannot be restored in a cluster of OceanBase Database V4.3.3 or later.
Data backed up in OceanBase Database V4.3.2 cannot be restored in OceanBase Database V4.3.3 or later.
Upgrade considerations
Non-shared storage mode
- You can smoothly upgrade an OceanBase cluster from V4.4.1 or an earlier V4.4.x version to V4.6.0.
- You can smoothly upgrade an OceanBase cluster from V4.3.5 BP2 or an earlier V4.3.x version to V4.6.0. This is applicable only to POC and test environments. The upgrade may fail, and you may need to rebuild the environment if the upgrade fails. We recommend that you upgrade the cluster to V4.4.1 before you upgrade it to V4.6.0.
- You can upgrade an OceanBase cluster from V4.5.0 to V4.6.0.
- You cannot upgrade an OceanBase cluster from V4.2.x or an earlier version to V4.6.0.
- You cannot upgrade an OceanBase cluster from V4.4.2 to V4.6.0.
Shared storage mode
You cannot upgrade an OceanBase cluster of a lower version in shared storage mode to V4.6.0.
Upgrade path

Note
- This upgrade path applies only to SN mode. For information about upgrade paths for other versions, see
oceanbase_upgrade_dep.yml. Theoceanbase_upgrade_dep.ymlfile records the upgrade paths of OceanBase Database. - After you decompress the RPM package of the target version, the
homeandusedirectories are generated in the directory where the RPM package is stored. The upgrade-related scripts and theoceanbase_upgrade_dep.ymlfile are stored in thehome/admin/oceanbase/etcdirectory.
oceanbase_upgrade_dep.yml file. For more information, see the Step 2: Confirm the upgrade process section in Upgrade OceanBase clusters.
This section describes the upgrade path.
V4.2.x:
- You can upgrade from V4.0.0.0, V4.1.0.0, V4.1.0.2, or V4.2.0.0 to V4.2.1.11 and then to V4.2.5.7.
- You can upgrade from V4.2.2 to V4.2.5.7 directly. You can also upgrade from V4.2.2 to V4.2.5.0 to V4.2.5.6 and then to V4.2.5.7.
- You can upgrade from V4.2.5 BP7 to V4.4.2 or V4.4.2.1.
- Barrier version: V4.2.1.11 and V4.2.5.7.
V4.3.x:
- You can directly upgrade from each V4.3.x version to V4.3.5.6.
- You can upgrade from V4.3.5.6 to V4.4.2.1.
- You cannot upgrade from a version of V4.2.x or earlier to a version of V4.3.x.
- Barrier version: V4.3.5.6.
V4.4.x:
- You can upgrade from V4.4.0, V4.4.1 to V4.4.2 or V4.4.2.1.
- You can upgrade from V4.4.0, V4.4.1 to V4.6.0.
V4.5.x:
- You can upgrade from V4.5.0 to V4.6.0.
What to do next
References
For information about how to use OceanBase Cloud Platform (OCP) to upgrade OceanBase clusters, see Upgrade version.
