I recently upgraded from SharePoint 2010 RC1 to SharePoint 2010 RTM on my development machine. Being a development machine there were several old projects that had been ripped from SharePoint without deactivating the features. SharePoint tends to swallow these problems – although they show up in the logs. Upgrade, on the other hand, is blocked by these problems.
I received several errors at upgrade time including errors like
[OWSTIMER] [SPContentDatabaseSequence] [ERROR] [5/6/2010 1:10:30 PM]: Found a missing feature Id = [11d1f820-10d9-48c9-bc44-4ae4439be635], Name = [FeatureName], Description = [], Install Location = [PackageName_FeatureName]
And
[OWSTIMER] [SPContentDatabaseSequence] [WARNING] [5/6/2010 1:10:31 PM]: File [Features\ PackageName_FeatureName \ModuleName\Files\Custom.css] is referenced [1] times in the database [WSS_Content], but is not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature/solution which contains this file.
[OWSTIMER] [SPContentDatabaseSequence] [WARNING] [5/6/2010 1:10:31 PM]: One or more setup files are referenced in the database [WSS_Content], but are not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature or solution which contains these files.
I was not surprised by the first error. I had removed features without deactivating them, and how could psconfig know how to upgrade them if they no longer existed in the farm. The second set of errors was unexpected and spoke to a new layer upgrade I had not expected. The files that it was complaining about were documents that I have deployed to libraries using SharePoint modules. The modules were gone, but the libraries existed. How did it know that the document came from a SharePoint module and why does it care?
Further examination of the dbo.AllDocs table in SQL Server Management Studio turned up that it contains the columns “SetupPath” and “SetupPathVersion” which can tie a document in a library back to a feature deployment action. Apparently, one of the activities psconfig does during upgrade is to check if the file in the library should be replaced by a newer version that had been deployed into the 14 hive. I am not sure if that is done by comparing the matching SPPersistedFile within the config database or by comparing the document with the actual file on disk. The SetupPathVersion is a tinyint so it is hard to understand what it maps against.
Regardless of the algorithm, it is pretty clear what upgrade was attempting to do. This adds a new item to my list of upgrade functions that psconfig executes:
+ Check SPPersistedObject versions in the config database and call the IUpgradable and IUpgradable2 interfaces to get them to upgrade as needed.
+ Traverse the SPSite-SPWeb trees in the farm and upgrade each feature instance using the feature upgrade CAML along with any SPFeatureReceiver.FeatureUpgrading methods.
+ Examine all Library documents, determining if any come from features. If they do come from features, check to see if a new version needs to be loaded from the 14 hive.
In my situation the upgrade failed and directed me to fix errors (shown in log) and try again. The error may say: “Please install any feature or solution which contains these files.” I thought this would be rather risky with my half upgraded farm. To complete my upgrade, I went to SQL Management Studio and deleted the problematic data from my content database. I queried the dbo.Features table based on the feature IDs in the log and deleted those rows. I queried the dbo.AllDocs table based on the SetupPath of files found in the log and deleted those rows. I kicked off:
PS> psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b
Which completed successfully and I was upgraded.
