Release Notes — Chapter 2

Supported Platforms

For a complete list of support platforms, see Supported Platforms in the Installation Guide.

Supported Filesystems

For a complete list of supported filesystems, see Supported Filesystems in the Installation Guide.

Upgrade Support

This section describes upgrade support to MarkLogic 8. For details on installing MarkLogic Server and for the upgrade procedure, see the Installation Guide.

Upgrading is supported from 5.0-6 or later. If you are running a release prior to 5.0, you must first upgrade to MarkLogic 5, MarkLogic 6, or MarkLogic 7 before upgrading to MarkLogic 8. If you are upgrading a cluster, you must first upgrade the node in which the Security database forest is located before you upgrade other nodes in the cluster. MarkLogic Corporation strongly recommends performing a backup of your databases before upgrading to MarkLogic 8. Additionally, MarkLogic Corporation recommends that you first upgrade to the latest maintenance release of MarkLogic 5, MarkLogic 6, or MarkLogic 7 before upgrading to MarkLogic 8.

An upgrade from 5.0 to MarkLogic 8 will reindex any databases that have reindex enable set to true. Upgrading from MarkLogic 6 or later does not require a reindex. If you choose not to reindex your databases, they will run in either 5.0 compatibility mode, depending on the version of MarkLogic Server in which they were last loaded or reindexed. Running in compatibility mode will disable certain MarkLogic 8 features and may treat all content in the database as English language content. For details on database compatibility, see the Installation Guide.

MarkLogic 7 and later includes a new rebalancing feature with a more efficient document placement algorithm. Upon upgrade, databases from previous MarkLogic releases are set to use the legacy document assignment policy, which is the same as used in previous MarkLogic releases. If you do plan on reindexing an upgraded database, MarkLogic recommends that you consider setting your databases to use the new bucket document assignment policy. The bucket policy is more efficient for rebalancing your database across forests if you add or remove forests from your configuration. For more details, see Database Rebalancing in the Administrator's Guide.

There are some known incompatibilities between MarkLogic 8 and MarkLogic 7. You might need to make some minor code changes to your MarkLogic 7 applications before they can run correctly in MarkLogic 8. For details on the incompatibilities, see Known Incompatibilities with Previous Releases. For instructions on upgrading to MarkLogic 8, including information about database compatibility between MarkLogic 8 and MarkLogic 7, see the Installation Guide.

If you are upgrading to MarkLogic 8.0-8 or later version 8 release, you may have to install MarkLogic Converters package separately. For more details, see MarkLogic Converters Installation Changes in Version 8 Releases Starting at 8.0-8 in the Installation Guide.