Upgrading Database Catalogs and Virtual Warehouses in Cloudera Data Warehouse Public Cloud

You need to learn about the choices, requirements, and alerts for upgrading Database Catalogs and Virtual Warehouses in Cloudera Data Warehouse (CDW) Public Cloud.

Before you begin the upgrade

Obtain the DWAdmin role.

Take a look at the release notes for the following information:

Text and JSON configuration files

After upgrading, text and JSON configuration files in your upgraded Database Catalog and Virtual Warehouse are not upgraded. The pre-upgrade configurations are carried over to the upgraded Database Catalog and Virtual Warehouse. For example, in the Database Catalog > Configurations, the .yml file example below is not upgraded.

Configurations, such as key/value configurations, that are not in a text or JSON file are not affected by this limitation. These configurations are upgraded.

Upgrade available indicator

Database Catalogs and Virtual Warehouse must be compatible. The CDW upgrade framework understands the interoperability constraints between them, and generates alerts. Alerts appear to indicate when upgrades are available for the Database Catalog and Virtual Warehouse as showin in the following image:

Latest releases versus compatible releases

A release is considered compatible with the current release if its dependents or dependencies do not need to be upgraded. Compatible Database Catalogs do not need to be upgraded to function effectively with associated Virtual Warehouses. Compatible Virtual Warehouses do not need to be upgraded to function effectively with the associated Database Catalog.

Some releases contain changes that require upgrading associated components. For example, a Hive Virtual Warehouse might use new APIs introduced in a new release of the Hive metastore/Database Catalog. In this case, you must upgrade the Database Catalog that is associated with this Hive Virtual Warehouse. On the other hand, if you upgrade a Database Catalog, you are not required to upgrade its associated Virtual Warehouse. The Latest releases indicator appears in this case.

Available upgrade choices

When you click Upgrade, you might see one of the following options:

Already up-to-date, which means there are no new releases that you can upgrade to.
Upgrade to the latest version:

Click Upgrade Virtual Warehouse to start the upgrade process. The status of the upgrade appears: Upgrading, Starting, or Started.

Difference between upgrade and rebuild

Starting with the CDW 1.8.5-b35 release, upgrade and rebuild operations perform different tasks. Upgrade operation updates the image version of the CDW entity. Rebuild operation deletes and recreates the pods while preserving the image version and configutrations.