SUSE Manager database migration takes too long during the upgrade from 4.X to 4.2

This document (000020290) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Manager 4.2 Server

Situation

The migration of SUSE Manager from 4.0 or 4.1 to 4.2 has several steps, as explained in the documentation:
https://documentation.suse.com/suma/4.2/suse-manager/upgrade/server-y-zypper.html
The last step consists in running a script in order to migrate the underlying database from postgresql 10.X (SUSE Manager 4.0) or 12.X (SUSE Manager 4.1) to 13.X. The problem that can be observed (however, not necessarily), is that the process simply takes too long, and no progress is displayed in the screen. This can lead to customers worrying about some problem going on. Anyway, there is a message in the screen warning about this, in addition to the release notes. Quoting these release notes:
"Please note the database migration from PostgreSQL 10 (if migrating from SUSE Manager 4.0) or PostgreSQL 12 (if migrating from SUSE Manager 4.1) will rebuild the database indices. This may take several hours if you have thousands of software channels."

Resolution

Enough downtime should be allocated for the migration, provided that the uptime of the SUSE Manager is critical. Unfortunately, there is no possible way to speed up this process. A similar issue was observed in the upgrade from 4.1.X to 4.1.5, but this took much longer than the issue described in this article (so it should be able to use that time as a metric for comparison and consider that this problem will last shorter. However, it should be noted that prior to the database migration, there will be a service pack migration, so that does not mean that the aggregated time will be shorter).

Cause

A reindexing is required due to a newer version of glibc (2.26 vs 2.31). This added extra complexity to the database migration and if not taken into account would result in corrupted indexes.

Status

Reported to Engineering

Disclaimer

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