Upgrading from umbraco 15 to 17 getting Invalid column name 'sortableValue

Questions
1

I’m upgrading an Umbraco project and the upgrade fails during database migration with the following error:

Invalid column name ‘sortableValue’.

Umbraco.Cms.Infrastructure.Migrations.Upgrade.V_15_1_0.FixConvertLocalLinks

From the stack trace, it looks like Umbraco is trying to read from umbracoPropertyData using sortableValue, but that column does not exist in my database.

I checked the database:

  • cmsPropertyData does not exist (which I believe is expected in newer versions)

  • umbracoPropertyData exists

  • sortableValue column is missing

the fix is to just run
ALTER TABLE dbo.umbracoPropertyData
ADD sortableValue NVARCHAR(512) NULL;

2

Since this is an umbraco 15.1 0 migration, can you upgrade Umbraco to the latest version of 15 before upgrading to 17?

3

I saw the same issue when I tried to upgrade to 15.1.0 first, but the solition for us were to upgrade to 15.2.0 instead and then go to 17.1.0. Seems like the 15.0.0 and 15.1.0 migrations are not that stable.

4

Although they should be, it’s very much recommended to always go to the latest minor version of the Umbraco version you’re updating from before doing any major update.

5

You are right, they should be. But the problem is that this is not always possible and sometimes you actually have to find a specific version for an upgrade to go through. That my experience at least, having upgraded multiple sites from 7 and all up until 17.