Upgrade To 9.2.0.6 Options

[shay_b]

Hi
ineed to do Upgrade to my database from 8.1.7.4 to 9.2.0.6 i can do this in ONLINE ?

i can"t shutdown the database is need to be in ONLINE 24H * 7 DAY .

[dave]

no you cannot do it online (think about it)

you need downtime

[herod]

Hi
ineed to do Upgrade to my database from 8.1.7.4 to 9.2.0.6 i can do this in ONLINE ?

i can"t shutdown the database is need to be in ONLINE 24H * 7 DAY .

You need downtime.

I have done this for one of our 24*7 systems, and this was my approach - others will have a different approach. Possibly better. we went 8 to 10g

1.) We rented similar hardware to what the production DB was working on. We bought a duplicate set of drives.
2.) We got a copy of the production DB running on the rental, made sure it was all good (days of work).
We made sure that the mount points etc were all the same as on prod - an exact as possible duplicate.
3.) Had downtime, unmounted the drives (external bays) from the prod machine, put those drives in place on the rental. Brought everything back up. Total downtime was 19 minutes and worked like a charm. put the new drives on the prod box
4.) We upgraded the prod database on the prod machine, tested did our work, took weeks while everything ran on the rental. We built refresh scripts that converted data that needed converted, we also kept the 10g DB as refreshed as possible from the prod DB, only about 1 hour behind using manual scripts.
6.) we scheduled downtime on the rental, refreshed the data, and remounted the drives. Took under an hour. Brought the prod machine back up and decomissioned the rental as soon as we got user sign off a day or two later.


We took the time to add 2 CPU's and some RAM to the production machine as well in the time the rental was running. It was just barely over an hour total downtime spread weeks apart. management was happy and since we scheduled the work for 3am our time, nobody really cared from the users. And those that did - we apologized for the scheduled maintenance.

Costly as we had to pay for the rental and an entire duplicate set of disks. But we used the extra disks on other servers once we were done with them.


This was on HPUX

[burleson]

Hi Herod,

Wow. Great tip, I'm impressed.

Thanks for sharing . . .

Also, one of my consutants (Steve Karam, OCM) has another low-downtime upgrade approach:

http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_rolling_upgrades.htm