MusicBrainz is announcing a new schema change release set for May 11, 2026. Schema-wise, this release will be very light. At the same time, we’ll be requiring some major dependency upgrades to Perl, PostgreSQL, and Node.js. We’ll also be switching from Redis to Valkey in production. See below for more information.

The only breaking schema change is MBS-14252. It drops columns which are unused even in MusicBrainz Server, so should have little impact.

Here is the complete list of scheduled tickets:

The following tickets change the database schema in some way.

• MBS-6551: Database does not prevent a release from having duplicate label/catno pairs. This ticket involves replacing an index on the release_label table for additional data sanity. We’ll introduce a unique index on (release, label, catalog_number) (with NULL values treated as equal). This should have no impact on downstream users.
• MBS-14092: Add support for series of series. This will allow connecting series that are related to each other in some way; for example, a series of series that have been honored with the same award, like the Golden Globe Award for Best Podcast. This involves adding a new series_series view, and replacing the allowed_series_entity_type constraint on the series_type table. It doesn’t modify or remove any other parts of the schema.
• MBS-14252: Drop “source” column from iswc and isrc tables. As the title says, this drops the unused isrc.source and iswc.source columns from the database. Unless you’ve specifically referenced these columns in a query, this change should have no impact on you.

• MBS-14243: Upgrade the required version of Perl to 5.42. This is required as Perl 5.38 will no longer receive critical security fixes past July 2026.
• MBS-14246: Upgrade the required version of PostgreSQL to 18. We last upgraded to PostgreSQL v16 two years ago, and would like to take advantage of the many performance advancements in PostgreSQL since then.

  Note that the PGDG maintains an official APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu. PostgreSQL 18.3 is also available on Amazon RDS.

  An upgrade script will be available for MusicBrainz Docker users with instructions provided at release time.

• MBS-14244: Upgrade the required version of Node.js to 24. This is a straightforward upgrade to the latest LTS release, as Node.js v20 will soon be end-of-life.
• MBS-14245: Switch from Redis to Valkey. Valkey is compatible with Redis OSS 7.2, and should be a drop-in replacement. There’s no reason to expect that Redis would stop working either. (The commands that MusicBrainz Server uses are very basic, and work even in Redis v3.)

• SEARCH-756: Trigger reindex from dbmirror2 replication data. This drops the dependency on RabbitMQ and pg_amqp for live updating the Solr search indexes, and triggers the reindex process directly from PostgreSQL instead, by relying on the change data we already generate there for replication packets. If you run a local search indexer, this will simplify the setup/dependencies needed. Database-wise, it will require replacing triggers and creating a new “sir” schema.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.