Crowd membership information import can fail when internal Jira users are still present in the database (or import XML file)

I ran into this problem while upgrading from 4.2.1-b588 to 4.3.3. The problem occurs both when using the Export/Import upgrade method as well as the in-place direct database upgrade paths.

The problem occurs under the following circumstances.

• Crowd Integration is enabled on a user directory with more than 10,000 users
• two internal Jira users are present in the Jira database from pre-crowd integration (though these are not used at all in any projects, issues, or permissions)
• The exported XML version of the database contains membership information like: <OSMembership id="10000" userName="<username>" groupName="jira-administrators"/>
• the crowd directory does NOT include groups that match the default Jira groups: jira-administrators, jira-developers, jira-users

The exception contained in the attached text file occurs during the upgrade, and blocks the upgrade as well as rendering Jira unusable.

My only solution to the problem was to revert the database to a pre-upgrade backup and then manually remove the users/groups and memberships records from the three tables userbase, groupbase and membershipbase.

More information can be found on this problem in your support system under the issue JSP-80318