Cassandra > Administration and Maintenance > Upgrading

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I will explain in this section briefly the general steps that you need to follow to upgrade your Cassandra to a new version. The steps below needs to be executed in each of the nodes.

1-First of all, you need to read and familiarize your self with the new changes and features of the new release.

2- Run the below command to rewrite the SSTables to make sure that all of them are running the current version of Cassandra:

nodetool upgradesstables

3- Run the below command to flush all the data that are currently in your MemTables to be written to the SSTables:

nodetool drain 

4- Stop your node as shown below:

sudo service cassandra stop

5- Take a copy of your current configuration file to be used later as a backup because this file might be overwritten with default values of the new Cassandra version.

6- Install the new version. For more details, check the installation section.

7- Configure the new version based on your old configurations and configure any new configurations for any new features.

8- Start the node again using the below command:

sudo service cassandra start 

9- Upgrade the SSTable as done in step 2 so that the tables will be rewritten to work with the new version :

nodetool upgradesstables

10- Finally, check the logs for any errors, warning or exceptions.