Collection of EBS upgrade information for Oracle Database 19c

This was the question I received the most often during the Virtual Classroom web seminars last week: “Can you say something about EBS upgrades with 19c?”. And I promised to publish a blog post about it. But as I’m not an EBS expert, I can only share a Collection of EBS upgrade information for Oracle Database 19c. For all further inquiries, please open an SR or get in touch with your Oracle contact.

Photo by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash

Recap – EBS and Oracle 19c

In September 2019, right before Oracle Open World, we announced the certification of EBS with Oracle 19c:

• Oracle EBS 12.2 on-prem is now certified with Oracle 19c – and will become a PDB

The big challenge for you here clearly was and is the requirement to migrate your EBS database into a PDB when you upgrade to Oracle 19c. You can have still non-CDBs with Oracle 19c – but not with your EBS database. It will become a single tenant. And you may have seen other restrictions by the time of the announcement. For instance, Oracle Multitenant indeed is not supported yet. Especially the section about the database features not being supported in the blog post of the EBS team triggered a lot of questions:

• Active Data Guard
• Data Guard
• Data Masking
• Database Vault
• Transportable Database and Transportable Tablespaces for data migration processes

I stopped counting how often I had discussions with EBS customers about these limitations since then. If you have questions about the support for Data Guard and TTS for EBS with 19c, please read below.

Collection of EBS upgrade information for Oracle Database 19c

In MOS, a lot of EBS notes get displayed. And almost all of them are VERY long. But clearly, the notes to start with are:

• MOS Note: 2552181.1 – Interoperability Notes: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 with Oracle Database 19c
• MOS Note: 2580629.1 – Interoperability Notes: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 with Oracle Database 19c

Oddly enough, the tool to upgrade the database is DBUA. And there are a lot of extra steps necessary.

In addition, you may want to check these notes – and most likely they are linked from the interoperability notes as well:

• MOS Note: 1581549.1 – Best Practices for Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.and Upgrade Downtime
• MOS Note: 2662860.1 – 19c Database with Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Known Issues and Solutions
• MOS Note: 1392527.1  – Database Patches Required by Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Engineered Systems: Exadata Database Machines and SuperClusters
• MOS Note: 396009.1 – Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

And while I was reading back and forth in the EBS MOS Note jungle, I found these notes here:

• MOS Note: 2704990.1 – Oracle Database 19c Upgrade Analyzer for Oracle E-Business Suite
• MOS Note: 1585889.1 – Useful E-Business Suite 12.2 Documents

I can just confirm that it is really useful.

Furthermore, the EBS team has a blog series of Quarterly EBS Upgrade Recommendations which I found very helpful, too:

• Quarterly EBS Upgrade Recommendations – May 2020

Data Guard and EBS with Oracle 19c

As I explained above, the original EBS 19c blog post mentioned no support for DG and ADG (Actice Data Guard). But interestingly you can find these notes:

• MOS Note: 2617787.1 – Business Continuity for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 on Oracle Database 19c Using Physical Host Names
• MOS Note: 2608030.1 – Using Active Data Guard Reporting with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 and Oracle Database 19c

which explains that you of course can have a physical standby with EBS in Oracle 19c with the CDB architecture. You can even use ADG for reporting purposes. So there must have been a change I haven’t noticed regarding the certification of DG and ADG. Well …

RAC and EBS with Oracle 19c

Here you find also several notes on MOS, such as:

• MOS Note: 2530665.1 – Using Oracle 19c RAC Multitenant (Single PDB) with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2

EBS Migration to Oracle 19c

I guess, these notes may be helpful:

• MOS Note: 2554156.1 – Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Database Instances Using Oracle Database 19c
• MOS Note: 2633516.1 – GoldenGate 12c / 19c Is Certified With E-Business Suite 12.X/?

The OGG Note is an interesting one as it basically says: The OGG team does not certify for a specific application. So it is in the hands of the EBS team to tell you whether you can use OGG with EBS. Well … again …

And there is more information available for OGG with EBS:

• MOS Note: 2004495.1 – Using Oracle GoldenGate to Replicate Data from Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2

But how about Transportable Tablespaces?

Actually since this MOS note exists and is public:

• MOS Note: 2674405.1 – Using Transportable Tablespaces to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Using Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition On a Multitenant Environment

I assume that TTS is fully supported. Before eEven MOS Note: 1377213.1 – R11i / R12: Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrades and Platform Migration didn’t reveal anything about Oracle 19c support or the reasons whether TTS was or wasn’t supported for 19c migrations.

Further Links and Information

• The original “EBS is certified with Oracle 19c” blog post of the EBS team
• Oracle EBS 12.2 on-prem is now certified with Oracle 19c – and will become a PDB
• MOS Note: 1320300.1 – Oracle E-Business Suite Release Notes, Release 12.2
• Oracle Applications Lifetime Support Policy

–Mike