Choosing the type of upgrade

This section helps you choose the type of upgrade. Note that each type of upgrade corresponds to the Coverity Platform installer options as shown in the following table. This chapter uses the terminology specified in the table to describe upgrade types:

Upgrade types are described in the following subsections.

Intermachine upgrade

Use the intermachine upgrade if you want the upgraded Coverity Connect instance to exist on a new host machine. Otherwise, use the in-place upgrade or the Backup-and-restore upgrade.

In-place upgrade versus backup-and-restore upgrade

An in-place upgrade is faster and uses less disk space than a backup-and-restore upgrade. However, a backup-and-restore upgrade keeps the old instance intact, which is useful if you want to create a staging environment.

An in-place upgrade transforms an existing Coverity Connect instance, including all of its data, into a new Coverity Connect instance in the same directory location on the same machine. Essentially, an in-place upgrade does the following:

• Optionally, backs-up the existing database
• For PostgreSQL major version changes, modifies the data storage format in-place
• If required by Coverity Connect, upgrades the database schema
• Updates non-database state (the configuration not stored in the database)

A backup-and-restore upgrade backs-up the entire, existing Coverity Connect instance. Then the backup-and-restore upgrade restores the Coverity Connect instance, including the database, to a new location (a different directory than where the existing instance is installed) on the same machine without affecting the existing instance. Essentially, a backup-and-restore upgrade does the following: