Oracle Upgrade Cont.

I have completed the Oracle Upgrade on our test system and then rolled back to Oracle 9 and upgraded the DB again to 10.2.0.4.

This process was pretty straightforward. The company whose application uses this Database has some useful tools to utilize during the upgrade process. One gives you the ability to modify the SPFILE directly without causing any issue. I would not normally do this but the tool is very nice. I used the DBUA to complete the upgrade and I upgraded the Database in place. That is to say that I did not have to copy the Data files to a separate location before doing the upgrade.

I ran into two snags on the second run and both were easily resolved. First is the Listener, I was not able to start or stop it. It kept telling me that the password was not recognized. Now I am not sure why this listener has a password on it as this is not the standard setup for us. I could see that the password was in the listener.ora file and not encrypted. I tried to change the password, and I tried to pass the password to lsnrctl but it kept telling me that it was wrong. To resolve this I finally ps –ef | grep lsnrctl and found the listener process. I killed it. I then was able to do a lsnrctl start and the listener started. I am now able to do anything I need to the listener. Just a strange and frustrating issue.

The second is that the DBUA put the ARCHIVE_MODE into a NO ARCHINVE state. This caused an issue when doing a hot backup. The Hot backup script is custom made by the application developers and requires that the ARCHIVE_MODE be in ARCHIVE. I had to bring the DB down and do a startup mount. Then I was able to change this and restart the DB again. Now everything seems to be working and I will be starting the upgrade on our production cluster and failover standby database next week.

If you have any questions let me know by leaving a comment or head over to http://sysadminsmith.com and click on the submit a question link on the right.