No patches anymore for Oracle Database 11.2.0.3

Mike says:

Well,

if you want to pay for Extended Support (20% additional support fee per year in years 2 and 3) then feel free. No offense.

And I see your point of the application certification. But if SAP could certify 12.1.0.2 why can’t your app vendor do it? Ask them the question please 😉

And again, the tests for 11.2.0.4 vs 12.1.0.2 are exactly the same. 11.2.0.4 has plenty of changes over 11.2.0.3 as has 12.1.0.2. Whatever time/effort you put into releasing 11.2.0.4 you’ll put into 12.0.1.2.

Now do the math:
/1/ Less than 5 months Waived Extended Support for 11.2.0.4
/2/ If you are not willing to pay extra you’ll fly without patches
/3/ 12.1.0.2 will offer you almost 3 years of Premier Support

Cheers
Mike

Mike says:

Don,

I have seen your tweet and I can just repeat my offer to check your SRs and issues.

Believe it or not, our teams has helped and helps customers every day, from smaller shops to large insurances including In-memory. I never say that 12.1.0.2 is bug free but most things can be avoided by studying the patch notes and following the advices in our slides.

Still this is no guarantee to hit no issue at all – that’s why proper testing is highly recommended for every environment of importance. Especially SPA (SQL Tuning Advisor) can be a great help to detect issues BEFORE upgrade.

No offense but my experience of dealing with upgrades and migrations in the past 12 years is often that proper testing is a big no-go in many shops for obvious reasons: Time, effort, costs, test environment, license costs for any pro testing tool etc etc. I can see that. I have seen this many many times.

Believe it or not, you’d have seen the same number of issues with 11.2.0.4 – and I completely disagree with you about your statement that 12.1.0.2 is not ready. Otherwise our reference customers Roy, myself and our team have helped to go live wouldn’t be happy and still alive.

Again, I can repeat my offer:
Send me a list of your SRs or at least the issues you have seen and I’m happy and eager to learn from your experiences.

Cheers
Mike

Connor McDonald says:

"Unfortunately" I’m now an Oracle employee, so I’m sure people will take my comments as tainted with bias, but all I can do is assure all that the comments below are genuine.

*Before* I joined Oracle, the previous year was spent upgrading my employer’s databases, covering:

11.2.0.3 => 12.1.0.1
11.2.0.4 => 12.1.0.1
11.2.0.4 => 12.1.0.2
12.1.0.1 => 12.1.0.2

the mix being simply due to the timing of each, and what the state of the source database was. Plenty of variety across all of these databases – some small, some large, some RAC, some single instance, some became pluggable, some became single instance, some were 24×7 (with DataGuard, cross-site mirroring etc), some were less critical.

Adding to the mix was that some were same platform upgrade (Intel Linux => Intel Linux), and others were cross-platform migration (pSeries AIX => Intel Linux).

So pretty much the whole gamut of possible scenarios were in there. And I can say that the experience of moving from 11g to 12c has been overall a very positive one. It’s like every other upgrade (Oracle or otherwise) that you’d expect to see, namely, 10% of your stuff runs better, 80% of your stuff runs the same, and 10% of your stuff might need a closer look when you move to the new version.

Like any upgrade, the aim is to capture that knowledge during testing, which was what the client did in the main, but due to tight schedules some of the testing was curtailed on the understanding that we’d need to be extra sharp and reactive should we see these issues in Production. And we were.

But no "show stoppers" were discovered.

I know this comes across as a "well, it worked on my machine" style comment, but thats not the intent. Its sad that other’s experiences have not been as positive as mine, but all I can say is – my perception (as both a non-Oracle employee and as an Oracle employee) of the move to 12c has been a very happy one.

Hope this helps,
Connor

Don Seiler says:

I’ve emailed the list of SRs to Mike just now. I tried to include Connor as well but my guess at his oracle.com email address seems to be wrong.

Mike says:

Basant,

as far as I know you can download and test everything you want. But I’m not a license person.

You should find any answer in here:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/license.112/e47877.pdf

But you can take also our hands-on-lab which has exercises as well – see to your right in the SLIDES DOWNLOAD CENTER on the blog.

Cheers and all the best
Mike

Mike says:

Kirill,

that depends a lot on the ULA agreement – Extended Support is (as far as I know) not necessarily part of an ULA – but it can be included. Still in this case it won’t help you for 11.2.0.3 😉

But thanks for the addition!

Cheers
Mike

Mike Dietrich says:

Please see:
Oracle Support Document 1050790.1 (Oracle Forms/Reports Certification Reference) can be found at: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=1050790.1

12c Release 2

Forms/Reports 12.2.1 (Fusion Middleware 12cR2)

In version 12.2.1, middle tier, client tier, and browser certifications are listed within the same document.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/ias/downloads/fusion-certification-100350.html

For information regarding certified database versions, please refer to the above reference.

11g Release 2

Forms/Reports 11.1.2.x (Fusion Middleware 11R2)

In version 11.1.2, middle tier and client tier certifications are listed within the same document.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/ias/downloads/fusion-certification-100350.html
For information regarding certified database versions, please refer to the above reference.