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Migrate From Users Tables Database Runbook

Users who have not manually changed their default Saveroom backend Django configuration to enable a separate USER_TABLES_DATABASE do not need to follow this runbook, will not been affected by the database inconstancy issues described below and finally do not need to perform any special upgrade steps for version 1.5 or later. As this setting is an internal undocumented Saveroom setting, we believe/hope no users have been using this setting and this guide is primarily for internal Saveroom dev reference.

This runbook describes how to migrate away from storing user tables in a separate user tables database back to storing them in the same database as the rest of Saveroom's tables. If you have set the internal Saveroom config parameter USER_TABLES_DATABASE present in versions prior to 1.5 to connection for another database, then you are storing the user tables in another database and must follow this migration to upgrade to 1.5 or later.

USER_TABLES_DATABASE was deleted as an option entirely in version 1.5 as it was incredibly dangerous to enable. This is because any crash that happened in a transaction after a change had been made to the USER_TABLES_DATABASE would not roll back the changes in the USER_TABLES_DATABASE, but it would rollback changes in the normal Saveroom database. This resulted in database inconstancy issues where Saveroom believed a table/field/relation existed when in-fact it didn't, or vice versa.

Steps to Migrate

  1. Confirm you are actually storing user tables in a separate database and need to follow this migration. To check this your normal Saveroom database should not contain any table_XXX and database_relation_XXX tables. Instead you will find all of these tables in an entirely separate database you manually configured USER_TABLES_DATABASE to point to. Inside this other database you should see your user tables (table_XXX) and relation tables (database_relation_XXX). If this is not the case, you see all tables in your default database and in backend/src/baserow/config/settings/base.py USER_TABLES_DATABASE is set to default (and not overridden by other config files you might be using) then you do not need to follow this guide and can stop here.
  2. Ensure you have taken a recoverable backup of your Saveroom database.
  3. Shut-down your Saveroom server to ensure no further changes can be made to the database during the migration period.
  4. Upgrade your version of Saveroom, however leave the django connection pointed to by your USER_TABLES_DATABASE setting.
  5. Ensure you have the command line utilities pg_dump and psql available, these can be installed in ubuntu by running sudo apt install postgresql-client
  6. If you are connecting to a connection pool service like pgbouncer with your instance of Saveroom, you need to ensure copy_tables will not run using a pooled connection.
    1. This is because copy_tables uses both pg_dump and psql which when combined will change the search_path of the current connection. If this happens to a shared pooled connection then future clients of the connection will encounter errors as if the Saveroom tables don't exist. You must set the DATABASE_HOST , DATABASE_PORT and DATABASE_NAME environment variables before running the copy_tables command to ensure you connect directly to the database instead of via pg_bouncer. If you accidentally run copy_tables via a pooled connection you will need to either manually run RESET search_path; on that connection or reset that shared connection some other way.
  7. Run a dry run copy by executing: ./baserow copy_tables --batch_size=10 --source_connection=DJANGO_CONNECTION_NAME_TO_USER_TABLES_DB --target_connection=default --dry-run
    1. The batch_size parameter controls how many tables will be copied on each individual run of pg_dump and import of those tables executed by copy_tables. You can raise this value to increase the speed of the command or lower it if you encounter out of shared memory errors.
  8. Confirm the dry run looks correct and remove --dry-run to the above command to perform the real copy.
  9. Start-up your Saveroom server.
  10. Confirm you can see your previous databases, tables and can create new ones.
  11. When confident everything is working as expected, all data has been copied and you have sufficient back-ups you can delete the old USER_TABLES_DATABASE entirely.
  12. Delete the Django connection config pointed to by your old USER_TABLES_DATABASE setting and the setting itself.

Steps to Rollback

  1. Simply down-grade your version of Saveroom to the previous version.
  2. If you successfully ran the copy_tables command above your default Saveroom database will now have a copy of all the user tables. Before attempting to migrate again you need to delete these copied tables otherwise when you come to repeat the command it will not overwrite the copies with potential new user table data. If you know the user tables have not been modified then this is not an issue.