All the errors I encountered and what I did upgrading from moodle 2.3 - 2.6

I tried incremental upgrades from 2.3.2 - 2.3.11, 2.4.9, 2.5.5, 2.6.2.  and experienced various issued while upgrading the DB.  Mostly the upgrade reporting that tables already existed and failing in the upgrade.  I would typically manually remove the table, poss. losing data in it, then allow the upgrade process to continue.

I ended up going from 2.3.2 - 2.6.2, directly.  These are the errors I encountered and what I did.

I opened mysqlworkbench and manually deleted this table from the upgrading DB.  BUT BEFORE I KILLED IT, I used workbench to create a script that would re-create the table, in case i need it back, which I knew I would.  I saved the script as a snippet.

Clicked Continue...back around to plugins check, clicked Upgrade DB

I deleted all 6 tables from the DB that started with mdl_qtype.

Clicked Continue, back around to plugins check.  Clicked Upgrade DB

Complaining about the table I killed earlier, funny huh?  I ran the snippet/script that I previously created that rebuilt this table. 

Clicked Continue, back around to plugins check.  Clicked Upgrade DB

I deleted 4 tables that had _assignfeedback_* in their name.

 Clicked Continue, back around to plugins check.  Clicked Upgrade DB

And......the upgrade completed.

I did lose some data in those tables, not much, but some.  This is completely stupid and unexceptable, BUT, the upgrade did finish.

In my other install, when I had similar issues, I blamed it on the 550 MB DB, which was causing timeout in php scripting - which was causing the script to reload....??  Maybe my assertion there was incorrect, since I have a much smaller DB I was upgrading here, with no timeouts and still had these issues.

I wonder why me?  What is wrong with my process OR what is wrong with my configuration.

It must be one of the other....