Upgrading Qlik Sense

[psz]

Hi there,

We would like to upgrade a Qlik Sense November 2018, 12.44.1 version at a client's Windows Server to the new Qlik Sense May 2025. Since there is no exact match for this issue found on the forums, we would like to ask you to provide a step-by-step guide what is needed to be done from our and from the client side. How many upgrade steps do we need to which versions, what PostgreSQL versions do we need at each step, what Windows Server version does the client need for the steps.

Thank you very much for providing a step-by-step guide for this.

Regards,

Szabolcs Pápai, Nextent Informatika Zrt.

[Daniele_Purrone]

Hi @psz ,

I would recommend doing that in a test environment first.
We have an upgrade path here with everything worth considering at each step. You might want to through some intermediate updates.

If the customer's environment is not particularly complex it might be worth importing the apps into a clean 2025, and then recreating what necessary.

[howdash · Accepted solution]

Generally speaking, to upgrade Qlik Sense you'll need to do these three to four things:

• Backup PostgreSQL server, certificates, and directories holding logs, configuration files, apps, extensions, etc.
  • If you don't have backups, anything goes wrong and you'll have a huge problem on your hands. Backups are a must.
• Test recovering Qlik Sense from backups on another server.
  • Need to make sure that the backups are complete and that if anything goes wrong, you'll be able to recover the server without issues.
• If the version of your PostgreSQL server is 9.6, you will need to first upgrade your PostgreSQL server to version 14 or newer before you will be able to update Qlik Sense to May 2025 version.
  • How you upgrade your PostgreSQL server will depend on whether you have a bundled or standalone installation of PostgreSQL.
  • If you have bundled installation of PostgreSQL, you will first need to upgrade your Qlik Sense server to February 2022, then use the QPI tool to upgrade you PostgreSQL server to a newer version.
    • After PostgreSQL has been upgraded, you will be able to upgrade Qlik Sense to May 2025.
  • If you have a standalone installation of PostgreSQL, you will need to upgrade it to version 14 or newer by following a typical PostgreSQL upgrade process and then upgrade your Qlik Sense server to May 2025 version.
  • Key point here is that your PostgreSQL server must be at least version 14. Latest supported version of PostgreSQL for May 2025 version of Qlik Sense is 16. Qlik Sense won't let you upgrade to the May 2025 version if your version of PostgreSQL is older than version 12. I recommend upgrading to at least version 14 because version 12 is no longer supported and version 13 is going out of support in few weeks.
• Once you have your backups, confirmed that you can use them to recover Qlik Sense, and upgraded your PostgreSQL to version 14 or newer, you can download the initial release version of Qlik Sense May 2025 and run it to upgrade your Qlik Sense server.

If your Qlik Sense server is running in a virtual machine, I highly recommend creating a checkpoint before doing all of this work so you will be able to easily rollback the changes if anything goes wrong.

Those are the high-level steps:

1. Backup
2. Test recovering from backups
3. Make sure that PostgreSQL is up to date
4. Upgrade Qlik Sense

If this is the first time you're doing upgrade, give yourself few weeks to learn all this stuff and, like @Daniele_Purrone mentioned, test the upgrades on your test server first.

P.S. Check out this article I put together on LinkedIn where I show what to backup when backing up Qlik Sense and this one where I talk about how to go about recovering Qlik Sense in various scenarios.