Upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2 – New MOS Notes

Arun Gupta says:

Mike,
I am a bit confused about MOS note 2173141.1. There is no mention of parallel upgrade using catctl.pl. This note mentions running dbupgrade with no mention of parallelism.

Is there any MOS note on how to upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 12.2 and convert from non-CDB to single tenant?

Thanks,
Arun

guest says:

Hi Mike,

I guess the patch updates will follow the Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct schedule. It wouldn’t be cloud first? We can expect the first patch updates to be out in Apr 2017?

Cheers.

Mike says:

Dates for PSUs and BPs (I’d highly recommend BPs over PSUs) stay the same:
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

18 April 2017
18 July 2017
17 October 2017
16 January 2018

Cheers
Mike

Naveen Garg says:

Hello,

Just some feedback for the community that follows this blog.

I downloaded the 12.2 software yesterday and did a couple of test upgrades, everything worked as expected. Roy/Mike, great job making the upgrades simple and straight forward.

We have close to 150 single instance databases that we plan to upgrade to 12.2 in the next 3-6 months. I tried the GUI DBUA and the process took close to 53 mins.

I tried the DBUA -silent option and that went pretty well as well. The same database took 30 mins to upgrade. I used the following options for the -silent option.

/u01/app/oracle/product/12.2.0.1/bin/dbua -silent \
-sid <SID NAME> \
-oracleHome /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2 \
-recompile_invalid_objects true \
-gatheringStatistics true \
-upgradeTimezone true \
-emConfiguration NONE \
-upgrade_parallelism 4

Thanks.

Mike says:

Naveen,

for "simple" DBUA (either silent or interactive) is currently the best approach for now (there will be something in a future patch set which may be even better).

"dbupgrade" is just a wrapper for:
$ORACLE_HOME/perl/bin/perl $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/catctl.pl -n 4 $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/catupgrd.sql

Cheers
Mike

Arun Gupta says:

Mike,
I am testing upgrade of 12.1 RAC GI to 12.2 and it fails at creating GIMR. It seems that after upgrade to 12.2, ASM is unable to read the spfile with the error:

ERROR: Unable to get logical block size for spfile ‘+DG_CRS/clu12c/ASMPARAMETERFILE/registry.253.938012473’.
MEMORY_TARGET defaulting to 1128267776.

Since ASM cannot read spfile, it does not know the disk discovery path and the diskgroups are not mounted. Querying the v$asm_diskgroup returns no rows. This causes failure of creating GIMR. The 12.1 GI home was patched to Oct 2016 patch. The cluvfy pre crsinst did not show any error. The 12.1 GI was working perfectly and I had tested stop/start of ASM multiple times. There is nothing on MOS about this error. The disks are iSCSI with 512 byte block size, so there is nothing unusual. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Arun

Mike says:

Jennifer,

there are no SPUs for Oracle Database 12c (12.1 and 12.2) anymore.
You can choose between PSUs and BPs whereas I strongly recommend you the BPs as they contain more fixes and get some significant additions soon.

For 12.2.0.1 there are no patch bundles (PSUs or BPs) available yet. The first one will be released in mid April.

And you are right, SPUs (11.2), PSUs (11.2, 12.1, 12.2) and BPs (11.2. Exa-only, 12.1, 12.2) are all cummulative having the previous SPUs or PSUs or BPs included as well.

Cheers
Mike

Mike says:

Arun,

would you please mind to grab our big 12.2 slide deck from the Slides Download Center and scroll forward to around slide 400 to the "Fallback Scenarios" section?

This will show you options for issues "During" and "After" the upgrade.

Let me know if anything is unclear.

Cheers
Mike