Comments - Help me understand mariadb-upgrade

The mariadb-check-upgrade is probably this script or a close variant:

https://git.almalinux.org/rpms/mariadb/src/branch/a9/SOURCES/mariadb-check-upgrade.sh

This relies on the file mysql_upgrade_info in the datadir to identify if an upgrade procedure was performed and if so which version it occurred.

I suspect your database initialization/restore procedure didn't create the file.

So its just a bit confused by the lack of a file. You can create one to silence the warning

echo 10.5.22-MariaDB > mysql_upgrade_info

There was a time previous to 10.5.14 (MDEV-27607) when an installation didn't provide this upgrade file.

I was just about to make a restore again without deleting the "mysql_upgrade_info". mariadb-backup even forces me to empty the datadir. This is really misleading in my opinion.

mariadb-backup --copy-back --target-dir=2024-08-05-10-22-37
mariadb-backup based on MariaDB server 10.5.22-MariaDB Linux (x86_64)
[00] 2024-08-06 08:15:37 Original data directory /var/lib/mysql is not empty!

Thank you for your help.

In fact this file is missing. I made a test and deleted the whole "datadir" and started MariaDB. The database was initialized from scratch and "mysql_upgrade_info" is present.

Something is wrong with the backup/restore procedure!

I made my backup and restore with mariadb-backup according to this manual https://mariadb.com/kb/en/incremental-backup-and-restore-with-mariabackup/.

In the "restore" section there is clearly stated "ensure that the datadir is empty" so I deleted the content of /var/lib/mysql and of course the "mysql_upgrade_info" was deleted too.

Obviously "mariadb-backup" did not create this file so either the manual is wrong or some program involved in the restore/startup process should create this "mysql_upgrade_info" file.

Yep, sounds like worthy enhancement. Please create a request on https://jira.mariadb.org