Almost every week Roy, Carol and I receive one or more emails in the following style:
“Hey, we (or my customer) plan(s) an upgrade to Oracle 11g. We (or the customer) wants zero downtime. Currently we (or they) are on AIX with Oracle 10g (and someold 9i) databases. Can we get an advice please?”
or another one here …
“Upgrade from 8i to 11g. The customer’s database is 28 TB (quite big!). Downtime is 5-6 hours. It’s on AIX. And it’s an it’s an Oracle EBS database”
Well, in both cases we lack a lot of useful information – or sometimes things are almost impossible or simply wishful thinking. So we have a collection of (we call them) The Magic Questions. Once those are answered upfront it is way easier to give a helpful advice.
- Will you exchange the hardware?
- Will you change to a new OS version?
- Will you change to an entire new OS architecture?
- Will you change the database characterset?
- Do you plan to consolidate (schema/database/…)?
- Number of databases you plan to upgrade or migrate?
- Size of database(s)?
- Exact source and target Oracle versions?
- Maximum allowed downtime per database?
- Fallback requirements?
- Test environment available? Testing tools?
- Does a performance baseline exist?
- Changes required to enable new features?
- RAC/Grid Infrastructure already in use or planned?
Once we get the answer and (even more helpful) a sheet describing the entire landscape in more detail we will be able to give some advice.
-Mike
Great,
Do you have set of Questionnaires to migrate database from existing machine to another machine from Solution design point of view ?
Like I have existing database running on IBM machine SUSE Linux Oracle 11 DB need to migrate to HP x86 Machine running RHEL 7
Avinash,
it’s in the making right now – but this will be ready sometime in November or December as an app guiding you to the best possible techniques and highlighting the doc links, papers and notes. Please be patient 🙂
Cheers
Mike
Here’s another MAGIC question.
Besides running a job pre- and post- upgrade and comparing timings as a ‘baseline’.
I believe in OEM, you can schedule a repeating baseline and then you can compare them later on. Is this really necessary if you are already having the hourly AWR report. Presumably, you can compare AWR reports from a pre- and post- upgrade, for example 12c and 19c. Or you can’t? 🙁
Hi Edwin,
this blog post may be a bit outdated today. But basically it is meant to give us enough information 🙂
Cheers,
Mike