Best practices on upgrading cassandra

Question

I am getting errors from pyspark connecting to cassandra because it appears I am using a too old a cassandra:

[idf@node1 python]$ nodetool -h localhost version
R         


        

Answer 1

I'm guessing you are using OSS version. Default location for data is /var/lib/cassandra and you can backup it if you wan't. Procedure for upgrade is simple:

1. run nodetool drain
2. stop cassandra
3. save your cassandra.yaml
4. remove old and install new version
5. update new cassandra.yaml with your settings
6. start cassandra
7. run nodetool ugradesstables

This should leave you with your node running the new version of cassandra with all your schema and data in it. Be careful if you are upgrading past 2.1 because 2.2 and up require java8. Everything else is the same.