Canada rocks – and is really cold in winter

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Workshop 0

Last week I’ve had one of those travel weeks where I accumulate many working hours already by flying and having layovers and delays at lovely airports. Plus of course, I work in addition and deliver full-day workshops. And see customers. Still, I won’t complain as I like my job a lot. Especially meeting with customers and discussing various upgrade and migration topics can be really challenging sometimes. And I can confess, Canada rocks – and is really cold in winter. Seriously …

Canada rocks - and is really cold in winter

One of these weeks …

When you travel to Canada in winter, especially in a January, you can …

January 2020 AutoUpgrade is available for download

Posted on January 9, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich AutoUpgrade 6

All of you upgrading your databases with AutoUpgrade or planning to do so can now download the newest version of our AutoUpgrade tool. We are offering the 20191220 version. If you ask yourself why we release the December version in January 2020, there’s a simple answer. We do extensive system testing with it before releasing it to the public.

January 2020 AutoUpgrade is available for download

Photo by pixel | visuals – Patrick Humm on Unsplash

Download 20191220 AutoUpgrade

You can always download the newest and some previous versions of the AutoUpgrade tool via this note:

MOS Note: 2485457.1 – AutoUpgrade Tool

January 2020 AutoUpgrade is available for download

At the bottom of the …

GI Patch 28553832 may be needed before you upgrade to 19c

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich ASM / RAC / GI Flaws and Pitfalls 0

Thanks to my colleague Sebastian Alasino who works in the MAA team out of the UK. Sebas highlighted this issue to. And I’d like to share it with you when you attempt to upgrade Grid Infrastructure to Oracle 19c. If you have the Docker RPM installed and you were lazy on patching, then GI Patch 28553832 may be needed before you upgrade to 19c.

GI Patch 28553832 may be needed before you upgrade to 19c

Photo by Daniel Frank on Unsplash

What is the issue?

If the Docker Engine RPM is installed and your GI version is 12.1.0.2, 12.2.0.1 or 18c below a certain patch level, the CSSD demon fails to …

Welcome onboard: Daniel Overby Hansen as Cloud Migration PM

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich General 0

I’m very happy to announce that as of January 1, 2020 a new decade begins. And Daniel Overby Hansen joins our group as new Cloud Migration Product Manager. I worked with Daniel on the customer side at SimCorp for many years. When we had a job opening in our group, we were very happy when Daniel applied for the opportunity.

Welcome onboard: Daniel Overby Hansen as Cloud Migration PM

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Who is Daniel?

Daniel Overby Hansen – Senior Principal Product Manager – Cloud Migrations – Oracle

Daniel has many years of experience in building enterprise-grade software from the Danish global provider of financial software, …

“My” best records for 2019 – and some other thoughts

Posted on January 2, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Off Topic 2

Oh well, the older I get the faster years seem to pass by. I think this is natural. And a while ago I read a very good and reasonable explanation for this. But I can’t complain actually. Life is not boring at all – and I learn something new almost every day. As you know, one of the main reasons for this blog is to share parts of my learning experience with you, the good, the bad – and the patches 🙂

But there’s a life apart from Oracle (at least sometimes). And as some of you may know, music …

Happy New Year 2020!

Posted on January 1, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Off Topic 0

Hi everybody,

let me start the new year 2020 (for techies: 11111100100) with a loud HAPPY NEW YEAR everybody!
I wish you all the best! Peace, health, fun, joy, love and whatever you desire. And of course, no ORA-600 or patching errors or wrong results 😉

Picture kindly borrowed from my cousin Harald 🙂

Have a great start into 2020!

–Mike…

Mobiliar Insurance consolidates over 350 PDBs to new Exadatas

Posted on December 20, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Customer Success 0

The year is almost over and many of you will take off in your well-deserved holidays. At this point it’s not time yet for a 2019 summary or my “Best Records of 2019” list, but to highlight a great success story from Swiss Mobiliar Insurance’s Oracle team.

Mobiliar Insurance consolidates over 350 PDBs to new Exadatas

Photo by Melina Kiefer on Unsplash

Mobiliar Insurance – never heard about them?

There are actually two typical situations when you’ve never heard about Mobiliar Insurance (“Die Mobiliar“) before. You either don’t live in Switzerland and you never visited one of our workshops nor any of the talks Alain Fuhrer and …

ORA-1722 when upgrading to 19.4.0 or 19.5.0 on Windows

Posted on December 18, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 2

Oh boy – I try to avoid blogging about errors on a specific platform. But as this topic was brought to my attention now 3x in 2 weeks, I think I’ll send it out. And I hope you won’t hit this ORA-1722 when upgrading to 19.4.0 or 19.5.0 on Windows.

ORA-1722 when upgrading to 19.4.0 or 19.5.0 on Windows

What is failing?

The database upgrade only on the MS Windows platform fails when you attempt to upgrade to 19.4.0 or 19.5.0. This means, you downloaded and installed 19.3.0. And then you followed our advice and applied one of the most recent Release Update – ideally 19.5.0, the October 2019 …

Extended Support for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 extended

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Release Schedule 1

These are good new in case you plan to use Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 longer in production. Just last week we extended the Extended Support for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 by one additional year.

Extended Support for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 extended

Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash

Extended Support Extension for Oracle 12.1.0.2

Before, the Extended Support for Oracle 12.1.0.2 ended end of July 2021. Now you can purchase it until end of July 2022. For those of you who have it included in your contract anyway (for instance if you have a ULA or PULA), these are great news.

Please see:

MOS Note: 742060.1 – Release Schedule of

Thank you, Barcelona – I’ll be back soon :)

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Workshop 1

I stopped more or less watching Champions League football since it is available on pay TV only for over a year in Germany. But of course I saw the result yesterday: Barca lifting Dortmund into the play-off stage by beating Inter in Milano. Well, I guess, all BVB fans will have celebrated yesterday night. Still, the reason for my blog post is not football. But I’d like to say Thank you, Barcelona – I’ll be back soon 🙂

On Monday, Dec 9, 2019, I held a full day upgrade workshop in Barcelona. The Oracle ACS team did all …

Great License News: Spatial and Graph, Machine Learning

Posted on December 6, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich General 2

Just this week in Brighton at TechFest19 by UKOUG I’ve heard one of the common complaints about our license strategy. Something I can’t comment in my position. But even better that we are announcing some very good news now. Oracle is listening. It is a reaction to customer’s wishes.

Photo by pxoxo on Unsplash

Spatial and Graph

Effective December 5, 2019, Oracle Spatial and Graph (OSG) option will be included with Oracle Database. This will affect Enterprise Edition, SE2 and Database Cloud Service (DBCS) Standard Edition 2 and Enterprise Edition. This means, you can use Spatial and Graph in all …

Save Patching Downtime with Oracle Multitenant?

Posted on December 2, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Best Practice Patch Recommendation Single-/Multitenant 2

At OOW 2019 we announced that you can have up to 3 user-created pluggable databases (PDBs) per container database (CDB) without having a Multitenant license. And in this blog post I’d like to demonstrate how you can save patching downtime with Oracle Multitenant.

The Concept

The idea this entire process settles on is very simple. When you create a fresh container database in the target (already patched!) environment, you don’t have to patch this one. You only have to relocate the PDB from the source into the target CDB. In addition, only datapatch needs to be executed. As the …

Video: Best Practices to Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c

Posted on November 29, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Video / Viewlet 0

This is a short “Black Friday” blog post. And just if you are tired already of hunting supposed-to-be-bargain-buys, you may need something to relax – and watch this Video: Best Practices to Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c.

Video: Best Practices to Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c

Roy recorded it as part of the Quest Experience Week. We’d like to share it with you here.

Just click on the picture below to open a new TAB and watch the 1 hour video:

Video: Best Practices to Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c

https://vimeo.com/questoraclecommunity/review/374661161/ce9a8b21ba

If you are looking for the slide deck, you can download them from:

https://mikedietrichde.com/slides/#OOW19

Thanks!

–Mike…

AutoUpgrade Tips: Running two (or more) sessions in parallel

Posted on November 28, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich AutoUpgrade 0

Our intention with the AutoUpgrade as the single tool to upgrade your databases was initially: You have one big config file for your databases. And you will use this file to upgrade your databases unattended. Ideally you run an “analyze” at first, then you schedule a “deploy” for overnight or the next weekend or whenever it is convenient for you. But sometimes people have different needs. In this particular case several people asked whether you can run multiple AutoUpgrade tools in parallel on the same server. Hence, I’d like to explain the first of more AutoUpgrade …

UKOUG TechFest 2019 in Brighton – Dec 1-4, 2019

Posted on November 27, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Conference 0

Time really flies. As every year in November. Right after DOAG, there’s very little time for me to recharge batteries. And once I take a deep breath, I will sit in another airplane and fly to … England. No worries, I won’t do any political jokes. This is not necessary these days. And this is a techie blog. But I’m very happy that I don’t have to do any special preparation to visit UKOUG TechFest 2019 in Brighton – Dec 1-4, 2019.

Photo by Nitin Tulswani on Unsplash

Brighton?

To be honest, I know not much about Brighton. Except …

AutoUpgrade may fail when patch ID column is NULL

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich AutoUpgrade 17

Monday morning – it’s time to write a new blog post. And actually I will set priorities based on what you reported to me in the past week. This way it may prevent others from hitting the same pitfall. The AutoUpgrade may fail when patch ID column is NULL in REGISTRY$HISTORY.

AutoUpgrade may fail when patch ID column is NULL

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

What is happening?

You start a database upgrade with autoupgrade. But the initial check will fail with a message like this:

AutoUpgrade tool launched with default options
There was an error initializing the patching information for entry upg2

The AutoUpgrade won’t kick …

DOAG 2019 – Recap and a personal complaint

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Conference 14

Nürnberg and München are just 175 km away from each other, a bit more than 1 hour by train. Still I felt a post-conference blues already when I boarded the ICE train yesterday to head back to the south. It was an awesome conference – again. Except for one thing which I will write about below. So here’s my report on DOAG 2019 – Recap and a personal complaint.

DOAG 2019 - Recap and a personal complaint

Photo by Philippe Mignot on Unsplash

DOAG 2019 – What an agenda

I knew it before already. But my VP, Roy Swonger, visited DOAG Conference in Nürnberg for the first time. …

DOAG Conference 2019 – Our talks in Nürnberg next week

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Conference 0

Time flies so quickly. And in case you wondered about the silence on the blog and on twitter, I was either traveling the past weeks or on holidays. But it’s November. And November is DOAG conference month. So please find an overview about DOAG Conference 2019 – Our talks in Nürnberg next week.

DOAG Conference 2019 - Our talks in Nürnberg next week

DOAG – When, where, why?

Actually DOAG (German Oracle User Group) conference is one of the most important events for me every year. Not only because since far over a decade in my hometown, Nürnberg, Franconia, but for me it means meeting with a lot of …

DBMS_PDB.DESCRIBE – Something to be aware of

Posted on October 28, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Single-/Multitenant 2

When I wrote up my long blog post series about how to migrate to Multitenant, I came across an interesting behavior. I could create the XML manifest file to plugin without putting the database in read-only mode. But I learned afterwards that there are is a pitfall. Hence, this blog post will talk about DBMS_PDB.DESCRIBE – Something to be aware of.

DBMS_PDB.DESCRIBE - Something to be aware of

DBMS_PDB.DESCRIBE – why and when?

You will use the DBMS_PDB.DESCRIBE call for the sole purpose to create the so called XML manifest file. This file contains information about the non-CDB to plugin afterwards. You either generate it check …

New version of Upgrade / Migrate / Consolidate to Oracle 19c uploaded

Posted on October 24, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Slides 0

Please apologize that it took me a bit longer to upload a new version of our comprehensive slide deck. You can download now a new version of “Upgrade / Migrate / Consolidate to Oracle 19c” via the blog’s download page.

New version of Upgrade / Migrate / Consolidate to Oracle 19c uploaded

Why is there a new version?

Since Oracle Open World 2019 we have a new corporate template. And while I like the graphics quite a bit, I’d say, the people who built it have a good sense for graphics. But they aren’t powerpoint experts. In fact, almost every slide had to be adjusted. This may not be a huge …

Oracle Fail Safe is deprecated with Oracle Database 19c

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Fail Safe 0

I wanted to put this on the blog for quite a while but forgot to do so. Since Oracle Database 19c, Oracle Fail Safe has been deprecated. What does this mean?

Oracle Fail Safe is deprecated with Oracle Database 19c

Oracle Fail Safe is deprecated – Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

Deprecation of Oracle Fail Safe

First of all, deprecated does not mean desupported. Oracle Fail Safe is still fully supported. But since Oracle 19c, you will find this note in the Windows Admin Guide:

Deprecation of Oracle Fail Safe

Oracle Fail Safe is deprecated as of Oracle Database 19c. It can be desupported and unavailable in

Patching all my environments with the Oct 2019 Patch Bundles

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Patch Recommendation 20

Yesterday I blogged about the Oct 2019 Patch Bundles being available for download. And while I wrote this blog post, I downloaded all of them for my environments. Here I’d like to share with you the most simple path to apply them. As I have no cluster or ASM, I don’t have to patch Grid Infrastructure. And I don’t even have OJVM in any of my databases right now. Due to space constraints in my lab environment I will apply the patches in-place. You shouldn’t do this but instead use always a new home you patch. This allows you …

CPU October 2019 Patch Bundles are available

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Patch Recommendation 2

As of Oct 15, 2019, the CPU October 2019 Patch Bundles are available for download. So let me do the quarterly exercise to download and install all of them into my various environments.

CPU October 2019 Patch Bundles are available

Critical Patch Alert October 2019

At first, I check the Alert and the Risk Matrix whether critical issues with a high risk score are included. I will install the patch bundles anyway, but I’m curious. In my particular case I will take care on the database only. You of course will check for other products you are using, too.

Market Driven Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Release Schedule 1

I know that some of you are still on Oracle 11.2.0.4. And I don’t want to argue, why. I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason that you haven’t upgraded yet. Just remember: You can upgrade directly from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 19c. Just in case you plan to stay longer than end of 2020 on this ancient release, then you may want to read about the Market Driven Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4.

Market Driven Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4

Overview Support Periods Oracle 11g Release 2

First of all, let me give a quick overview on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 – usually …

Automatic SQL Plan Management – Slight Change with 19.4.0

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Oracle Database 19c SPM - SQL Plan Management 2

I did blog in more detail about Automatic SQL Plan Management in Oracle 19c. And Roy and I had really a lot of discussion in every customer meeting at OOW19 about it. But there is a slight change to where the feature is available with Oracle 19.4.0.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Slight Change

When you compare the settings of SQL Plan Management between Oracle 19.3 and 19.4, you’ll see the difference:

column parameter_value format a45
column parameter_name format a25
set pages 200

SELECT PARAMETER_NAME, PARAMETER_VALUE
  FROM   DBA_ADVISOR_PARAMETERS
  WHERE  TASK_NAME = 'SYS_AUTO_SPM_EVOLVE_TASK'
    AND PARAMETER_VALUE <> 'UNUSED'
  ORDER

One of these weeks …

Download 20191220 AutoUpgrade

What is the issue?

Who is Daniel?

Mobiliar Insurance – never heard about them?

What is failing?

Extended Support Extension for Oracle 12.1.0.2

Spatial and Graph

The Concept

Brighton?

What is happening?

DOAG 2019 – What an agenda

DOAG – When, where, why?

DBMS_PDB.DESCRIBE – why and when?

Why is there a new version?

Deprecation of Oracle Fail Safe

Critical Patch Alert October 2019

Overview Support Periods Oracle 11g Release 2

Slight Change

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