NOTICE: Support for DSpace 5 and 6 is ending in 2023

[Tim Donohue]

Dear DSpace Community,

The DSpace Steering Group announces that security support for DSpace 5.x and 6.x will end on the following dates:

• DSpace 5.x: Support ends on January 1, 2023

• DSpace 6.x: Support ends on July 1, 2023

This means that after those dates:

• That version of DSpace will be considered “end-of-life” (EOL)

• Future minor releases of that major version will not occur

• Bugs affecting those releases will not be addressed

• Security vulnerabilities affecting those releases will not be addressed

We recommend all institutions upgrade to DSpace 7 as soon as possible.

As we realize that both DSpace 5.x and 6.x are still in wide usage throughout the community, we’ve attempted to answer all questions you may have on our wiki at https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Support+for+DSpace+5+and+6+is+ending+in+2023

If your question is not yet answered on that page, please add it in the wiki page comments and we will ensure it is answered.

Sincerely,

The DSpace Steering Group

[Karlen Chase]

For those of us using Oracle as a database, we cannot upgrade beyond v.5.10 without altering the source release code of v.7.x, which carried over a Flyway bug from v.6.x that impacts Oracle users. In my academic library, we have no in-house developers who can alter the code, are hosted on-prem, and central IT does not support PostgreSQL, so a database migration is not an option for me.

Is my only option to migrate to a vendor-hosted DSpace v.7.x instance?

Regardless, I know I have a migration of some kind in my future. I just want some bright-line confirmation here to report to my leadership.

My understanding of the Flyway bug that has been part of the DSpace source release code since 2018, when v.6.0 was released (if memory serves, or at least, that's when I attempted to upgrade from v.5.4 to v.6.0 and ran into the Flyway bug), is that:

(1) IF I could migrate my Oracle database to a PostgreSQL database, then I could upgrade to v.7.x.

(2) BUT because central IT maintains the DSpace infrastructure at my institution and they support only Oracle databases, that means I must migrate to a hosted DSpace instance if my institution wishes to remain on DSpace for its IR.

Please confirm my understanding above or tell me if I am overlooking a third option.

Also, if anyone else is in the same boat as me--Oracle database user without in-house developers who can alter the Flyway part of the code, i.e., stuck on v.5.x, please let me know what you are doing or what steps your institution is taking to remedy your IR situation.

Thanks very much!

Karlen Chase

Head of Institutional Repository Services

UB Libraries

State University of New York at Buffalo (University at Buffalo)

[Tim Donohue]

Hi Karlen,

Your understanding is (unfortunately) correct.  

• DSpace Steering announced a deprecation of all Oracle Support, see this ticket: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8214   Oracle will no longer be a supported database for DSpace as of mid 2023.  
• The reasons for the decision are listed on this ticket. But, basically, we no longer have any Oracle experts in our community developer team, and (as you've rightly pointed out) we've had great difficulty even getting Oracle to work properly with DSpace 6 (because of a lack of Oracle experts / developers).  We asked several times on lists for help from others who wanted to continue to support Oracle, but no help was offered.
  

• DSpace 5 and 6 both are similarly ending support in 2023 (on Jan 1 and July 1 respectively). https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Support+for+DSpace+5+and+6+is+ending+in+2023
  

Together that means that as of midway through 2023, only DSpace 7 will be supported and only on PostgreSQL databases.  Obviously, anyone can choose to still run older releases of DSpace, but no further bug fixes or security fixes will be available on those older releases.

I realize this isn't great news if your university is only willing to support Oracle databases.  But Oracle databases have become impossible for DSpace to continue support simply because the vast majority of institutions using DSpace also use PostgreSQL (I don't have exact numbers, but I'd roughly estimate that 95% or more use PostgreSQL. I do know that 100% of our core community developers/Committers use PostgreSQL). This results in that great void of Oracle experts in our community, which is how so many Oracle specific issues have occurred in past years & why they remain unsolved for so very long.

If there are any other answers I can provide, let me know on this thread in the mailing list.

Tim

---

From: dspace-c...@googlegroups.com <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Karlen Chase <karc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 10:25 AM
To: DSpace Community <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [dspace-community] Re: NOTICE: Support for DSpace 5 and 6 is ending in 2023

 

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[Paco Mar]

Hi Karlen, Tim and rest of the group,

 We are in a similar situation at the Universitat Politècnica de València because the university only works with ORACLE. Our developer IT (jvribell) has worked on DSpace 7 and oracle (in development space). He was working to sent the changes so that code could be reused (https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/Release+Notes), but with the latest news that he will only be able to continue working with PostgreSQL we don't think it makes sense.

 We are now planning the future, we want to be able to continue managing it ourselves to develop functionalities so we need some time to jump to PostgreSQL but a year is not enough time I'm afraid. In Spain, at least, there are several institutions in the same case, the problem is different because in most cases they have outsourced maintenance, so their adaptation will be less traumatic

 Regards

 Paco Martínez. RiuNet

Universitat Politècnica de València

[Tim Donohue]

Hi Paco,

This decision was not made lightly. Back in Dec 2021, I sent a plea across all DSpace mailing lists for anyone willing to help us with Oracle support: https://groups.google.com/g/dspace-community/c/nXNMVBY_CJo/m/WbvtpXm2CQAJ   We received no offers of help.  Out of over 2,000 mailing list members, we received a total of 2 responses (one was Karlen), and both of those individuals said they'd prefer if DSpace kept Oracle Support, but they had no developers to help with that effort.

Three months later after receiving no offers of support or help, Steering made the difficult decision to drop Oracle support starting in mid 2023: https://groups.google.com/g/dspace-community/c/nXNMVBY_CJo/m/4pu7WKdUAgAJ

While I feel for those who are impacted, I don't see any way to continue Oracle support as DSpace has no developer resources available to do so.  None of our most active volunteer developers or most active service providers use Oracle.  As we've witnessed, Oracle support has been an ongoing problem for DSpace for a long time (simply from that same lack of reviewers, testers and bug fixers).

Sincerely,

Tim

[Paco Mar]

Hello Tim,

In my answer I explained to Karlen, and to the rest, that she is not alone, although it is true that the community of dspace users that works with oracle seems to be small and we have been too quiet :-/

It is clear that it has not been an impulsive decision, during this time we have communicated to our institution the news about this issue. As I commented, for those of us who want to work in house, it is some more complex in this situation

Thanks Tim for all the work, we keep in touch

Paco Martínez

[Tim Donohue]

Karlen & Paco (and others),

In case it is helpful in your decision making, we have an early guide for migrating from Oracle to Postgres using the Ora2Pg tool:

https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/DSpace+Oracle+to+PostgreSQL+migration

This guide was kindly created by staff at Université Laval, who recently & successfully performed this migration and took down some detailed notes

This guide has been linked now from the deprecation notice as well as one of two known options for this migration: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8214

Sincerely, 

Tim

[Karlen Chase]

Thanks, Tim, but PostgreSQL is not a database option at my university. We are stuck on DSpace v.5.10 with an Oracle database, so we are exploring other options. My fervent hope is that there will be no security issues after EOL in January until we can migrate our content to another IR platform.