Upgrade

Oracle Upgrade Complete

Last Sunday morning I came in to work at just after 2:00 AM and did the upgrade on our Production Oracle system. Since I had done this a few times on our test system I was ready for anything to happen. I had already installed the new version of Oracle and so I brought the DB Down changed my $ORACLE_HOME and went to work. Launched the DBUA and saw no instances available for upgrade. I closed DBUA and went to my oratab file and I saw that my current 9 version entry was in the file. Also had some commented out instances. I tried again and had the same result. Back to oratab and I deleted all the commented entries out. Now I can see my instance in DBUA.

Let DBUA do its thing and I was done in less than 2 hours. Since I was prepared for anything, almost nothing went wrong. We have been live with Oracel 10.2.0.4 since then and have had no issue.

Oracle Upgrade Complete

I was able to finish up the Oracle Upgrade that I wanted to do today. First I removed the previous installation of Oracle 10 on the server. I then installed the software and all patches that I needed. I then changed my variables to reflect the new Oracle Home Directory that I wanted to use. After that I launched the dbua and walked thru each step, I did not move the files during the upgrade so it was an in place upgrade. I did have a good backup that I could fail back to if needed. This is very important. After a couple hours the upgrade had finished. I still had to copy over the tns folder and change the listener.ora file also to reflect the new Oracle Home. I also needed to change some parameters in the spfile.ora. The application that uses this DB has provided a tool to edit the spfile directly. I edited the file and I started the DB with no issue. This took me just under 4 hours and that was my target time. I think that I am ready to upgrade our production servers and feel confidant that I will not have any issues that I can not overcome.

Oracle Upgrade Testing Once Again

Today I will again embark on the journey that is Upgrading Oracle. This will be the third and final time that I do this on our test system in preparation to upgrade our Production Cluster that also has a DataGaurd Backup solution. I expect this process to take a about 4 hours including the removal of the current Oracle 10 software that I have installed on the server. I am running through this from the very beginning and expect to hit no road bumps this time around. If all does go well this time then I will start to plan how I am going to handle the production environment and how much downtime I am going to require. I will require downtime since we are doing an in place upgrade. It would be nice to have enough disk to install 10 on one Cluster node and upgrade the Database files while moving them to a new disk location and then failing over the cluster once that is complete. I, however, will have to upgrade the files in place and use only the DR server as a backup. That should not be a problem though. I think I will upgrade one node bring the DB up and then install Oracle on the second node. Once that is complete the Cluster should be done. Then in a day I will upgrade the DataGaurd server as well and re-enable the replication.