End of Life Coming to MongoDB Version 3.4 and How to Start Upgrading

The end-of-Life (EOL) date for MongoDB 3.4 is approaching

As you may know, the End-of-Life (EOL) date for MongoDB 3.4 is approaching. This means that in January 2020, MongoDB is ending support for version 3.4. 

What happens on January 31st, 2020?

• We will no longer allow customers to provision new instances of Databases for MongoDB 3.4; however, you will be able to restore your existing instance into a new version.
• In line with our version policy, we will remove access to the database and take a backup. This backup will be available to be restored into a new supported database version. We will retain the backups for 30 days, in accordance with our documentation.

As a consequence, you should plan on migrating your databases over to MongoDB version 3.6 or version 4.0 and making any modifications to your applications that may need to be made.

Migrating to MongoDB version 3.6 or 4.0

For most deployments, we recommend using the mongodump and mongorestore utilities that come with MongoDB tools (or if you have MongoDB installed locally), to backup your database. Then, you’ll be able to restore it into your new MongoDB deployment running version 3.6 or 4.0.

To backup your data using mongodump, you’d run in your terminal the following command, and your backup data will be stored in the /dump directory if a destination is not specified:

mongodump -u <username> -p <password> --host <host name> --port <port number>  \ --db <database name> --ssl --sslCAFile <certificate file name> \ --authenticationDatabase admin

To restore that data in your database, use the mongorestore utility, which uses the files created by mongodump and sends that data as inserts over to your target database but ignores duplicated data. To restore your database into your new MongoDB deployment, you can run the following command while making sure that the dump directory is relative to your current working path:

mongorestore <username> -p <password> --host <host name> --port <port number>  \ --db <database name> --ssl --sslCAFile <certificate file name> \ --authenticationDatabase admin dump/<database name>

For more documentation on these utilities and the options that are available for them, see  mongodump and mongorestore from MongoDB.

For most use cases, mongodump and mongorestore will be more than sufficient to backup and restore your database to a new deployment. There are edge cases to using these utilities, however. If you have a very large MongoDB deployment, we recommend an open-source tool we’ve developed called Transporter. We have an article about the tool and how to use it and a Github repository for the tool.

IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB support for version 3.4

In order to keep your databases secure and compliant on IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB is going to continue to support version 3.4 for 180 days starting today. That means that for 180 days, you’ll be able to continue to provision MongoDB version 3.4.

We will be introducing backup and restore major version upgrades for IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB soon and we will follow up on this communication with the guidance on how to upgrade to a new major version.