Migrating older 1.4 project to 1.9

I've inherited a moderately large project written 2 years ago using Django 1.4, and wondering if it is worth creating a fresh 1.9 project and porting in the old code, or doing an in-place upgrade to 1.9? I have it running on 1.4 'as is' but if I run* python manage.py migrate* it comes unglued a

Multiple databases

I'm spinning up a new project and nearly all of the data I need to store can be normalized. Along with this normalized data is one piece that is better suited to a nosql database. The use case is that the normalized data will be fetched often, is very tabular in nature, and the additional data