New admin: need roadmap advice to migrate and upgrade from Enterprise 8.4.2

shecodes · January 30, 2019, 6:50pm

Hello all,

I just inherited control of an xWiki project and could really use some good advice: the version is Enterprise 8.4.2, and there are 3 wikis in play. There is a lot of data (several thousand pages), it’s using HQLDB; the attachments have been ported out to the file system from the db, and it has brutal latency issues. The machine it’s on is pretty craptastic and I don’t think the db is indexed either.

I want to migrate it to a better machine, and use an Oracle database. I also would like to upgrade to the latest stable version.

I’ve been reading up on xWiki and really like what I see. All thoughts/advice would be welcome.

tmortagne · January 31, 2019, 7:50am

Moving from one database engine to another is always risky but I agree with you that you cannot stay on HSQLDB for a production instance.

Ideally you should do it in two steps:

move the wiki to the new setup on the exact same XWiki version
** copy the permanent directory, see https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Backup#HBackupPermanentData
** export/import the database, see https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Backup#HUsingtheXWikiExportfeature
upgrade to new version (current LTS is 11.0.2)

shecodes · January 31, 2019, 2:29pm

Thank you so much for the advice! Is it generally safe to just upgrade to the latest version, or are there milestone versions to install in between for people with versions as old as mine?

tmortagne · January 31, 2019, 2:41pm

Upgrading directly is supposed to go fine (if not it’s considered an important bug).