Distributed Data Show Episode 71: Upgrading Cassandra Clusters with Carlos Rolo

Patrick McFadin talks with “Cassandra Archaeologist” Carlos Rolo of Pythian about best practices for upgrades in Apache Cassandra clusters.

Highlights
0:15 - Patrick welcomes Carlos to the episode and explains why he’s known as the “Cassandra archaeologist”.
2:10 - Carlos shares his tips for upgrades: read the documentation, make sure you’re doing backups and testing them, validate that your drivers work on a new version
3:18 - Doing a test upgrade is recommended, especially from an application perspective
4:00 - Upgrading across multiple version numbers takes some work, you need to go a step at a time and upgrade SSTables
5:14 - Online upgrades are the norm - this is a major reason why people choose Cassandra
6:23 - Changes affecting upgrades to Cassandra 4.0 - check the release notes!
7:13 - The most difficult upgrades are the ones involving transition away from the legacy Thrift API
9:35 - The final word - make sure to read the docs when doing upgrades

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