Table of Contents
You cannot skip major versions upgrading. If you are upgrading from version 0.90.x to 0.94.x, you must first go from 0.90.x to 0.92.x and then go from 0.92.x to 0.94.x.
It may be possible to skip across versions -- for example go from 0.92.2 straight to 0.98.0 just following the 0.96.x upgrade instructions -- but we have not tried it so cannot say whether it works or not.
Review ???, in particular the section on Hadoop version.
HBase has two versioning schemes, pre-1.0 and post-1.0. Both are detailed below.
Starting with 1.0.0 release, HBase uses Semantic Versioning for it release versioning. In summary:
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
- MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
- MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
- PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
- Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.
In addition to the usual API versioning considerations HBase has other compatibility dimensions that we need to consider.
(Y means we support the compatibility. N means we can break it.)
Table 1.1. Compatibility Matrix
Major | Minor | Patch | |
---|---|---|---|
Client-Server wire Compatibility | N | Y | Y |
Server-Server Compatibility | N | Y | Y |
File Format Compatibility | N[a] | Y | Y |
Client API Compatibility | N | Y | Y |
Client Binary Compatibility | N | N | Y |
Server-Side Limited API Compatibility | |||
| N | Y | Y |
| N | N | Y |
| N | N | N |
Dependency Compatibility | N | Y | Y |
Operational Compatibility | N | N | Y |
[a] Running an offline upgrade tool without rollback might be needed. We will typically only support migrating data from major version X to major version X+1. |
HBase has a lot of API points, but for the compatibility matrix above, we differentiate between Client API, Limited Private API, and Private API. HBase uses a version of Hadoop's Interface classification. HBase's Interface classification classes can be found here.
HBase Client API consists of all the classes or methods that are marked with InterfaceAudience.Public interface. All main classes in hbase-client and dependent modules have either InterfaceAudience.Public, InterfaceAudience.LimitedPrivate, or InterfaceAudience.Private marker. Not all classes in other modules (hbase-server, etc) have the marker. If a class is not annotated with one of these, it is assumed to be a InterfaceAudience.Private class.
LimitedPrivate annotation comes with a set of target consumers for the interfaces. Those consumers are coprocessors, phoenix, replication endpoint implemnetations or similar. At this point, HBase only guarantees source and binary compatibility for these interfaces between patch versions.
All classes annotated with InterfaceAudience.Private or all classes that do not have the annotation are for HBase internal use only. The interfaces and method signatures can change at any point in time. If you are relying on a particular interface that is marked Private, you should open a jira to propose changing the interface to be Public or LimitedPrivate, or an interface exposed for this purpose.
Before the semantic versioning scheme pre-1.0, HBase tracked either Hadoop's versions (0.2x) or 0.9x versions. If you are into the arcane, checkout our old wiki page on HBase Versioning which tries to connect the HBase version dots. Below sections cover ONLY the releases before 1.0.
Ahead of big releases, we have been putting up preview versions to start the feedback cycle turning-over earlier. These "Development" Series releases, always odd-numbered, come with no guarantees, not even regards being able to upgrade between two sequential releases (we reserve the right to break compatibility across "Development" Series releases). Needless to say, these releases are not for production deploys. They are a preview of what is coming in the hope that interested parties will take the release for a test drive and flag us early if we there are issues we've missed ahead of our rolling a production-worthy release.
Our first "Development" Series was the 0.89 set that came out ahead of HBase 0.90.0. HBase 0.95 is another "Development" Series that portends HBase 0.96.0. 0.99.x is the last series in "developer preview" mode before 1.0. Afterwards, we will be using semantic versioning naming scheme (see above).
When we say two HBase versions are compatible, we mean that the versions are wire and binary compatible. Compatible HBase versions means that clients can talk to compatible but differently versioned servers. It means too that you can just swap out the jars of one version and replace them with the jars of another, compatible version and all will just work. Unless otherwise specified, HBase point versions are (mostly) binary compatible. You can safely do rolling upgrades between binary compatible versions; i.e. across point versions: e.g. from 0.94.5 to 0.94.6. See Does compatibility between versions also mean binary compatibility? discussion on the hbaes dev mailing list.
A rolling upgrade is the process by which you update the servers in your cluster a server at a time. You can rolling upgrade across HBase versions if they are binary or wire compatible. See <xlnk></xlnk> for more on what this means. Coarsely, a rolling upgrade is a graceful stop each server, update the software, and then restart. You do this for each server in the cluster. Usually you upgrade the Master first and then the regionservers. See <xlink></xlink> for tools that can help use the rolling upgrade process.
For example, in the below, hbase was symlinked to the actual hbase install. On upgrade, before running a rolling restart over the cluser, we changed the symlink to point at the new HBase software version and then ran
$ HADOOP_HOME=~/hadoop-2.6.0-CRC-SNAPSHOT ~/hbase/bin/rolling-restart.sh --config ~/conf_hbase
The rolling-restart script will first gracefully stop and restart the master, and then each of the regionservers in turn. Because the symlink was changed, on restart the server will come up using the new hbase version. Check logs for errors as the rolling upgrade proceeds.
Unless otherwise specified, HBase point versions are binary compatible. You can do a <xlink></xlink> between hbase point versions. For example, you can go to 0.94.6 from 0.94.5 by doing a rolling upgrade across the cluster replacing the 0.94.5 binary with a 0.94.6 binary.
In the minor version-particular sections below, we call out where the versions are wire/protocol compatible and in this case, it is also possible to do a <xlink></xlink>. For example, in <xlink></xlink>, we state that it is possible to do a rolling upgrade between hbase-0.98.x and hbase-1.0.0.
[2] Note that this indicates what could break, not that it will break. We will/should add specifics in our release notes.