Dashboard Visualiser - Superset

Superset is a visualisation tool meant for querying data from a SQL-type database.

Version upgrade process (with rollback capability)

By default if you simply update the image that the superset service uses to a later version, when the container is scheduled it will automatically run a database migration and the version of superset will be upgraded. The problem, however, is that if there is an issue with this newer version you cannot rollback the upgrade since the database migration that ran will cause the older version to throw an error and the container will no longer start. As such it is recommended to first create a postgres dump of the superset postgres database before attempting to upgrade superset's version.

1. Exec into the postgres container as the root user (otherwise you will get write permission issues)

docker exec -u root -it superset_postgres-metastore-1.container-id-here bash

2. Run the pg_dump command on the superset database. The database name is stored in SUPERSET_POSTGRESQL_DATABASE and defaults to superset

pg_dump superset -c -U admin > superset_backup.sql

3. Copy that dumpped sql script outside the container

docker cp superset_postgres-metastore-1.container-id-here:/superset_backup.sql /path/to/save/to/superset_backup.sql

4. Update the superset version (either through a platform deploy or with a docker command on the server directly -- docker service update superset_dashboard-visualiser-superset --image apache/superset:tag)

Rolling back upgrade

In the event that something goes wrong you'll need to rollback the database changes too, i.e.: run the superset_backup.sql script we created before upgrading the superset version

1. Copy the superset_backup.sql script into the container

docker cp /path/to/save/to/superset_backup.sql superset_postgres-metastore-1.container-id-here:/superset_backup.sql 

2. Exec into the postgres container

docker exec -it superset_postgres-metastore-1.container-id-here bash

3. Run the sql script (where -d superset is the database name stored in SUPERSET_POSTGRESQL_DATABASE)

cat superset_backup.sql | psql -U admin -d superset