Movable Type 4.0 will make a lot of changes to your database schema to introduce performance enhancements and support for new features. For really large databases, say for databases with several hundred thousand comments for example, this process may take several minutes. Therefore users that feel that they have an exceptionally large database are encouraged to run the command line upgrade tool. To execute this tool, run the following command:
> export MT_HOME=/path/to/mt
> cd $MT_HOME
> perl ./tools/upgrade
Tips on how to Speed Up the Upgrade Process
Remove Temporary or Unneeded Data
Some blogs collect an extraordinary amount of blog spam, or activity log information and do not have that information purged or discarded [often enough]. Because some upgrades requires low level changes to the database, it is recommended for some users to purge all of their junk comments and trackbacks and to clear their activity logs prior to performing an upgrade. Doing so will decrease the time it takes to upgrade your system. This is really only necessary for systems that collect tens of thousands of junk comments in a month.
1 User Contributed Notes
You need so specify a username that will get promoted to a superuser:
perl ./tools/upgrade --name [MTusername]
Also - mt-config.cgi must be setup and pointing to the correct database before you can run an upgrade.