Testing an RDS for MySQL upgrade - Amazon Relational Database Service

Testing an RDS for MySQL upgrade

Before you perform a major version upgrade on your DB instance, thoroughly test your database for compatibility with the new version. In addition, thoroughly test all applications that access the database for compatibility with the new version. We recommend that you use the following procedure.

To test a major version upgrade

  1. Review the upgrade documentation for the new version of the database engine to see if there are compatibility issues that might affect your database or applications:

  2. If your DB instance is a member of a custom DB parameter group, create a new DB parameter group with your existing settings that is compatible with the new major version. Specify the new DB parameter group when you upgrade your test instance, so your upgrade testing ensures that it works correctly. For more information about creating a DB parameter group, see Parameter groups for Amazon RDS.

  3. Create a DB snapshot of the DB instance to be upgraded. For more information, see Creating a DB snapshot for a Single-AZ DB instance for Amazon RDS.

  4. Restore the DB snapshot to create a new test DB instance. For more information, see Restoring to a DB instance.

  5. Modify this new test DB instance to upgrade it to the new version, using one of the methods detailed following. If you created a new parameter group in step 2, specify that parameter group.

  6. Evaluate the storage used by the upgraded instance to determine if the upgrade requires additional storage.

  7. Run as many of your quality assurance tests against the upgraded DB instance as needed to ensure that your database and application work correctly with the new version. Implement any new tests needed to evaluate the impact of any compatibility issues that you identified in step 1. Test all stored procedures and functions. Direct test versions of your applications to the upgraded DB instance.

  8. If all tests pass, then perform the upgrade on your production DB instance. We recommend that you don't allow write operations to the DB instance until you confirm that everything is working correctly.