Let me do a quick Friday rant. Many of you can easily ignore this. But regardless of whether you are a colleague, a friend, a customer, a partner or just exploring AutoUpgrade because it is the coolest small tiny little tool Oracle has to offer, don’t use AI to build your AutoUpgrade config file, please!
Photo by Enchanted Tools on Unsplash
AI models are great … somehow …
No worries, I use AI tools as well, especially when I need to create some complex PL/SQL scripts. There is nothing wrong with it – unless you stay in control. I guess, we all have found columns in our AI generated scripts which aren’t (yet) in an Oracle database’s dictionary. This is a common issue I found. But luckily this can be fixed quickly manually since especially ChatGPT and others got really stubborn recently.
Anyhow, I showed a nice example on how creative LLMs are when it comes to AutoUpgrade parameters 2 years ago at the German Oracle User Group conference. Surprisingly, nothing has changed since then.
What does this mean?
Well, we all in the team receive at least twice per week AutoUpgrade config files which contain parameters sounding great – but they don’t exist (yet). This is quite frustrating for multiple reasons:
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- You will be frustrated since AU will ignore often unknown parameters, and then won’t do what you expect it to do
- We are frustrated because we have to spend time telling you which parameters are a complete and creative hallucination
There is a tool out there which does it right: The AutoUpgrade Composer. It always supports the newest parameters, the newest methods, it is super-up-to-date – and it doesn’t cost anything. Plus, you’ll be generating your config file faster than with any LLM.
Well, and it is correct then.
Some examples …
This is what you will get from AI
That’s just a random example from this week. We see this almost every day. Using AI does not mean that you should trust it. If you give up control, that’s not good (I try to phrase it politely).
global.autoupg_log_dir=/u01/app/oracle/autoupgrade/logs global.parallelism=6 upg1.max_pdbs_parallel=4 upg1.manage_resources=yes upg1.dbname=CDB19 upg1.start_time=NOW upg1.target_home=/u01/app/oracle/product/26ai/dbhome_1 upg1.sid=CDB19 upg1.log_dir=/u01/app/oracle/autoupgrade/CDB19 upg1.upgrade_node=localhost upg1.timezone_upg=YES upg1.restoration=YES
I spot immediately these parameters:
global.parallelism=6 upg1.max_pdbs_parallel=4 upg1.manage_resources=yes
None of these exists. You can read on Daniel’s blog how to tweak parallelism if you need to.
Use the AutoUpgrade Composer
Marcus Vinicius is a great guy. He did present with us at Oracle AI World 2025. And we work closely together with him to make sure he can implement the newest parameters as quickly as possible.
The tool is amazing, I use it by myself all the time (unless I find the files on Rodrigo’s, Alex’ or Daniel’s blog right away and can borrow them).
Therefore, please use the AutoUpgrade Composer. And not whatever AI. Once we are confident that LLMs can do it right for all use cases, we will tell you 🙂
And of course, you should then use the ground-breaking new release of AutoUpgrade 26.2 from February 2026 (or newer, depending on when you are reading this).
End of Friday rant!
Thanks for reading 🙂
One more thing … or two … or three
Of course, we have super-cool colleagues as well, and I need to promote three cool tools of another Markus here. Markus Doeringer works in Mihai Tudor‘s Black Belts team in Austria, and Markus shares three additional amazing tools with you:
And the story continues …
Daniel and I had a quick chat today about which LLM to use. And Kris Rice has started building up something which looks really promising (oracle-db-skills).
Anyhow, when I crafted this blog post about AutoUpgrade and the missing MOVE ability, I used a random LLM as well. My findings were:
- Overall structural approach is good
- Wrong order of sequences, e.g. you need to shutdown the database first, then start it read-only, then create the manifest file – not the other way round
- Wrong parameter option, e.g. DB_CREATE_FILE_DEST must be set differently
- Wrong command option, e.g. when you want to move to OMF, you need to use FILE_NAME_CONVERT=NONE – the LLM used a conversion
- Wrong AutoUpgrade parameters – don’t get me started again
Overall, there were so many syntactical and procedural errors that I just can imagine how badly one would have failed following the advice.
My resume: Oracle DBAs run the world – and they will be needed for a long, long time.
Further Links and Information
- AutoUpgrade Composer
- Data Pump Log File Analyzer
- CPAT Composer
- Migration Toolkit – Latency Calculator
- AutoUpgrade 26.2
- Kris Rice: Oracle-DB-Skills
–Mike
Many software developers suffered from this same issue and ended up adding the features that AI was suggesting to users as it increased popularity of their tool set. Since chatgpt scrapes the publically available blogs it will a great if you can write a blog post that explains all the parameters with references to authoritative documentation. Eventually chatgpt will pickup. Prompts like show all config parameters for oracle autoupgrade 26.2 will start showing correct results. World has changed and users are hooked to simple chat interface instead of using any other tool. Great opportunity to make your tool discoverable by millions of users simply by chatting.
Hi Ketan,
in this case, the AU config tool from Marcus Vinicius I linked is so much quicker and faster.
While you would prompt any AI with your case, you can click together 3x config files on the Composer.
Cheers,
Mike
Hello,
it doesn’t belong in this section, but “Datapatch return codes and helpful queries” => https://mikedietrichde.com/2026/02/14/datapatch-return-codes-and-helpful-queries/, but there:
Error 404. Page not found!
Best regards,
Sare
Sorry for that – I did publish accidentially – this is the correct link:
https://mikedietrichde.com/2026/02/17/datapatch-return-codes-and-helpful-queries/
Cheers,
Mike