Upgrading DSpace 7.6 → 10.0 when Postgres is on AWS RDS

[Evelyn Karari]

Hello all,

I'm upgrading from DSpace 7.6 to 10.0 on a fresh instance. Our database is on AWS RDS (managed Postgres, separate from the app server), and the assetstore is on EFS.

Most upgrade guides assume Postgres runs on the same server, where you pg_dump and restore locally. What's the recommended way to handle the database step when it's on RDS instead? Are there any RDS-specific issues to watch for during the migration?

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hello,

I'm not aware of existing DSpace guides around databases hosted in AWS, and unfortunately not familiar with how many differences may be required from the Upgrade Guide.  However, I'd recommend taking some general precautions like for any major upgrade, for example saving a backup/snapshot of your database first, and trying the upgrade using a development server (and database) before going ahead with your production instances.

For the database upgrade, you would first want to make sure your instance in RDS is running a version of Postgres supported by DSpace 10.0 (14.x -> 17.x).  Then, I believe you would still be running the database migrate command from your backend  (step 6, upgrading your database), as long as your backend has been configured to connect to your database in RDS; using "test" and "info" from the database command could also be useful for debugging. That said, I don't know if there are extra steps needed for FlywayDB to work properly with RDS, so if anyone has direct experience with that please do chime in.

If you do run into specific issues with upgrading your database in this way, feel free to share them back here!

Best,

-Lia