Transportable Tablespaces with M5 scripts support now 26ai

We have a lot of information in our seminars and blogs about Transportable Tablespace migrations. And since we have the M5 scripts for RMAN incrementally rolled forward backups and new RMAN functionality which avoids the spare storage, life has gotten so much easier. Now, some great news from the authors of the M5 scripts: Transportable Tablespaces with M5 scripts support now 26ai.

Photo by Mathew Antony on Unsplash

M5? Almost as fast as the car!

Some of you may still know the V4 PERL scripts. They had an evolution from V1 to V4 over the years and were our vehicle to decrease the copy (backup, restore, recover) time for large migrations with incrementally rolled forward backups. But they had limitations which became more and more an issue with larger, or encrypted databases. The M5 scripts as the next evolution changed the game thanks to Jony Safi and his amazing team. Instead of PERL, we are using shell scripts. And many complex tasks got fully automated.

If you want to learn more, then please watch parts of our Virtual Classroom Seminar – Episode 18: Cross Platform Migration – Transportable Tablespaces to the Extreme where we guide you through the exercise, and demo the M5 scripts. Or, you can just start trying it out in LiveLabs with the Next Level Migration with Cross-Platform xTTS.

Great news – M5 supports now Oracle AI Database 26ai

Jony sent an email this morning (or for him last night) announcing the support for Oracle AI Database 26ai as a migration target using the M5 scripts.

Why wasn’t it supported already? There was an RMAN issued which needed to be sorted out.

Now, the MOS note states boldly:

This procedure supports a minimum version of v19.18 for the source database. Upgrade to Oracle Database 26ai is supported.

Therefore, time to move to Oracle AI Database 26ai.

And do you want M5 speed with the newest database release? Then keep reading the next paragraph.

Parallel Metadata for Transportable Tablespaces

Let me add one very important advice here. When you have a time-critical migration to tackle, then consider seriously to move to Oracle AI Database 26ai instead of Oracle Database 19c. While Data Pump had parallel metadata export/import as a new feature in 19c, this didn’t apply to Transportable Tablespaces but only to regular Data Pump exports and imports.

The parallel metadata support in Data Pump for Transportable Tablespaces is actually an Oracle Database 21c feature which is not backportable to 19c. Therefore, if you’d migrate from 11.2.0.4 or 12.1.0.2 or 12.2.0.1 or 18c or 19c to 26ai, you won’t see any benefits on the export metadata side but significant performance improvements on the import part. And usually, the import part is the one which takes 2-3 times as long for the meta data compared to the export part.

Daniel did a test a while ago with an EBS database with 600.000+ objects, and while the export was twice as fast, the import went down from almost 7 hours to 2 hours.

That’s a remarkable improvement. Keep this in mind when you plan an xTTS migration.

Further Links and Information

• (KB144840) M5 Cross Endian Platform Migration using Full Transportable Data Pump Export/Import and RMAN Incremental Backups
• VC #18: Cross Platform Migration – Transportable Tablespaces to the Extreme
• LiveLabs: Next Level Migration with Cross-Platform xTTS

–Mike