Upgrade / Migration

Don’t use AI to build your AutoUpgrade config file, please!

Posted on February 13, 2026 by Mike.Dietrich AutoUpgrade Oracle AI Database 26ai Oracle Database 19c Upgrade / Migration 4

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!

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 …

Full Day Upgrade / Migration / Patching Workshop in Prague on September 17, 2025

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration Workshop 0

Summer season is almost over. And in between Oracle AI World in Las Vegas in October and now, there is one chance to meet us for a Full Day Upgrade / Migration / Patching Workshop in Prague on September 17, 2025. There are still some seats open, so please find the details below.

Full Day Upgrade / Migration / Patching Workshop in Prague on September 17, 2025

Photo by Ryan Lum on Unsplash

When and why should you attend?

September 17, 2025 – 9:30h-16:30h.

This is a full package of marketing-free technical content – we share not only slides but also information from our projects, lots of customer experience, gotchas, tips and …

A change in Oracle 12.2 and 19c with MV Refresh Stats Collection

Posted on November 23, 2022 by Mike.Dietrich Best Practice Upgrade / Migration 6

It’s not easy for me to put the topic into a searchable title for this blog post. The feature or change I will write about today came in actually with Oracle Database 12.2.0.1. But since many of you will move directly from Oracle 11.2.0.4 or 12.1.0.2 to 19c, the Long Term Support release, it may affect you as well. So let me explain a change in Oracle 12.2 and 19c with MV Refresh Stats Collection.

A change in Oracle 12.2 and 19c with MV Refresh Stats Collection

Photo by Ralph Mayhew on Unsplash

A customer story

The local Support team asked me a few weeks ago whether I have heard …

Pitfall: Upgrade to 21c fails when ORDIM is present but no SDO

Posted on August 25, 2021 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Oracle Database 21c Upgrade / Migration 4

You may have read my previous blog post about Upgrading a non-CDB to Oracle Database 21c. And I referred to a potential Pitfall: Upgrade to 21c fails when ORDIM is present but no SDO. In this blog post I would like to explain how to avoid this pitfall beforehand and explain what needs to be done.

Pitfall: Upgrade to 21c fails when ORDIM is present but no SDO

Photo by Sara Codair on Unsplash

What’s the problem?

In my previous blog post I showed you the ideal and normal way. But during my tests I came across an issue I was not aware of – and I simply had no …

Upgrading a non-CDB to Oracle Database 21c with AutoUpgrade

Posted on August 24, 2021 by Mike.Dietrich AutoUpgrade Oracle Database 21c Upgrade / Migration 27

Yesterday I wrote about the installation of Oracle Database 21c on Linux. But today it is time for Upgrading to Oracle Database 21c with AutoUpgrade.

Photo by Arjun MJ on Unsplash

AutoUpgrade

You may have heard it already from us and other colleagues, but we can’t repeat it often enough: There is only one recommended tool to upgrade your databases – and this is AutoUpgrade.

In my 21c home, I’m checking the deployed version of AutoUpgrade at first:

[CDB3] oracle@hol:/u01/app/oracle/product/21/rdbms/admin
$ java -jar autoupgrade.jar -version
build.hash 57ab246
build.version 21.1.3
build.date 2021/04/21 13:32:13
build.max_target_version 21
build.supported_target_versions 12.2,18,19,21
build.type production

Now please …

Upgrade fails with ORA-20001 during datapatch run

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich AutoUpgrade Oracle Database 19c Patch Recommendation Upgrade / Migration 23

I encountered this issue now multiple times in my own environment. And I searched MOS and tried different things. But I couldn’t solve it yet. My Upgrade fails with ORA-20001 during datapatch run – and I’d like to show you how to bring the upgrade to an successful end.

Upgrade fails with ORA-20001 during datapatch run

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

It all starts with an upgrade

In my lab environment I upgrade two databases often in parallel. An 11.2.0.4 database and a 12.2.0.1. The 11.2.0.4 upgrades always flawless. But the 12.2.0.1 occasionally fails. This is the screen AutoUpgrade is showing me – but this is not …

Upgrade Testing – Online Clone a PDB to 19c

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Single-/Multitenant Upgrade / Migration 46

In the past I wrote some articles about cloning PDBs to new environments. And I added a post about RELOCATE as well. But I realized that I have no specific blog post about a very typical scenario: Upgrade Testing – Online Clone a PDB to 19c.

Upgrade Testing - Online Clone a PDB to Oracle 19c

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

My Setup

I have an Oracle 12.2.0.1 CDB with a PDB, and another Oracle 19.6.0 CDB. I will hot clone the PDB from 12.2.0.1 to the higher version CDB, and then upgrade the PDB.

Upgrade Testing - Online Clone a PDB to Oracle 19c

The motivation to do it this way is to allow testing for the application …

Upgrade PDBs with RELOCATE – How does it work?

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Single-/Multitenant Upgrade / Migration 16

Today Roy and I received a question from a colleague about the RELOCATE feature in Multitenant. And I’d like to shed some light and this topic a bit more. Upgrade PDBs with RELOCATE – How does it work?

Upgrade PDBs with RELOCATE - How does it work?

Photo by Sebastian Pena Lambarri on Unsplash

RELOCATE and UPGRADE?

At first, it looks very promising to me. RELOCATE uses the HOT CLONE functionality of Multitenant but then relocates the PDB from one to another CDB. You need to fulfill a few important requirements, for instance:

Local Undo must be enabled in both CDBs
- This limits the technique to at least Oracle

Improved preupgrade.jar for Oracle 12.2 and 18c

Posted on September 21, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration 2

My team mates are really quick. We received an information early this week about a missing or wrong DV check in the preupgrade – and they implemented it within a day or so. The September 2018 version of the improved preupgrade.jar for Oracle 12.2 and 18c is available for download.

Improved preupgrade.jar for Oracle 12.2 and 18c

What’s new in this version:

It adds a recycle bin check when the autofixup for dictionary statistics is run
And it updates DV_AUDIT_CLEANUP to 11.2.0.4

Please find the new September versions of:

Oracle 12.2.0.1 preupgrade.jar – build 17
- There’s issue with “creating directories”

Oracle Database 18.3.0 Upgrade on premises

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration 2

As Oracle Database 18c is now available on Linux on premises, I blogged about the installation already. And the next logical step is the Oracle Database 18.3.0 Upgrade on premises. In this case I will show an upgrade on the command line from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 18.3.0. A DBUA upgrade will follow in a separate blog post later.

Oracle Database 18.3.0 Upgrade on premises

Before you can start with the upgrade, you may download the software first, and then install it:

If …

Upgrade Oracle 12.2.0.1 to Oracle Database 18c on-premises

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration 6

Upgrade Oracle 12.2.0.1 to Oracle Database 18c on-premises I’m currently refreshing our Hands-On Lab and will exchange Oracle 12.2.0.1 with Oracle 18.2.0. This blog post series is about how to Upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 to Oracle Database 18c on-premises. There are other blog posts available you may use by yourself if you plan to refresh the lab by yourself until we uploaded a newer version. And it’s actually a good exercise.

For Multitenant upgrades from Oracle 12.1.0.2 to Oracle 12.2.0.1 you may read this:

Upgrade Everything

List of PREUPGRADE checks executed by preupgrade.jar

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration 6

List of PREUPGRADE checks executed by preupgrade.jar

Most of you may not care about the checks our Pre Upgrade Check tool preupgrade.jar does. But some may. Especially in cases where you plan to run a command line upgrade unattended via a script. Therefore this List of PREUPGRADE checks executed by preupgrade.jar may help you.

List of PREUPGRADE checks executed by preupgrade.jar

As a result of a joint initiative between our Upgrade Development team and the Support group dealing with upgrade-related SRs we released this MOS Note:

MOS Note: 2380601.1
Database Preupgrade tool check list

Purpose of the new MOS note is to give you a complete list …

Minimum Supported Version for Database Upgrades

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich General Upgrade / Migration 6

This question comes up very often: What is the minimum supported version for database upgrades? Or a question I received today: “I have an Oracle 10.2.0.4 database, can I upgrade directly to Oracle 11.2.0.4?”

Usually I have to dig into my old slides from the past to give a definite answer. And of course, the Database Upgrade Guide of each version has the same information somewhere as well. Therefore I’d like to summarize the releases supported for direct database upgrades since Oracle 11.2.0.4 below.

Upgrade?

When I speak about database upgrades, I mean you’ll use either the command line …

What happens to components with OPTION OFF status during upgrade?

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration 11

In the newer releases of Oracle database you may see components with status OPTION OFF in the database’s registry. But what happens to components with OPTION OFF status during upgrade? Will those stay on the old release?

What happens to components with OPTION OFF status during upgrade?

You may have a quick look into your DBA_REGISTRY (or CDB_REGISTRY). I used the check_components.sql script.

COMP_ID	COMP_NAME			   SCHEMA	STATUS	   VERSION
-------- ---------------------------------- ------------ ---------- ------------
CATALOG	Oracle Database Catalog Views	   SYS		VALID	   12.1.0.2.0
CATJAVA	Oracle Database Java Packages	   SYS		VALID	   12.1.0.2.0
CATPROC	Oracle Database Packages and Types SYS		VALID	   12.1.0.2.0
JAVAVM

September 2017 releases of preupgrade.jar and preupgrd.sql are available

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Upgrade / Migration 7

On a regular basis the Database Upgrade Team releases new and improved versions of the preupgrade tools via a MyOracle Support note. And it’s time again: the September 2017 releases of preupgrade.jar and preupgrd.sql are available for download.

September 2017 releases of preupgrade.jar and preupgrd.sql are available

Please ALWAYS download the most recent versions of preupgrade.jar for upgrades to Oracle Database 12.2 and preupgrd.sql (including utluppkg.sql) for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 upgrade from MOS Note: 884522.1. The version you’ll download is way newer than the version you’ll get with the base installation.

preupgrade.jar – Rel.7 – September 2017

Please …

Why does the upgrade of PDB$SEED always take longer?

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Single-/Multitenant Upgrade / Migration 0

Upgrading the PDB$SEED takes always longer than any other container.
What is the reason for an upgrade of the PDB$SEED taking so much longer in a real world environment?

How does an upgrade with Oracle Multitenant work?

Upgrading the PDB$SEED takes always longer I have written several blog posts in the past about the different techniques to upgrade an Oracle Multitenant environment:

The interesting case happens in the “Everything At Once“. The PDB$SEED takes significantly longer to upgrade than any other container.

Upgrading the PDB$SEED takes always longer?

Quick recap: The PDB$SEED is the (I call it) blueprint …

New version of preupgrade.jar (build 5) is available

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 Uncategorized Upgrade / Migration 2

There’s a new and improved version of the preupgrade.jar (build 5 – May 2017) available for download from MyOracle Support:

MOS Note:884522.1: How to Download and Run Oracle’s Database Pre-Upgrade Utility

The same note will get you access also to the most recent builds of preupgrd.sql for upgrades to Oracle Database 12.1 and utlu112i.sql for the unlikely event you’ll have to upgrade a database to Oracle 11.2.0.4.

Please always exchange the version getting installed by default with the version we offer via MOS Note:884522.1 as the downloadable version is usually much newer and improved over the one getting deployed …

Issue with 2k and 4k db_block_size – ORA-1450 when upgrading to Oracle 12.2.0.1

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 Patch Recommendation Upgrade / Migration 6

Recently we got alerted by a customer and a colleague from Italy about an issue with the upgrade from Oracle 12.1.0.x to Oracle 12.2.0.1 if – and only if – your database got created with 2k or 4k db block size.

Problem

If your database got created with 2k or 4k db block size, and you attempt an upgrade from any upgrade-supported Oracle version to Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 the upgrade – regardless of DBUA or catctl.pl – will fail with an ORA-1450: maximum key length (1478) exceeded.

Analysis

In the catupgrd0.log – regardless of using the DBUA or …

Can I restart a failed Multitenant Upgrade as well?

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich catctl.pl Single-/Multitenant Upgrade / Migration 7

A while back I did blog about the new -R option of the parallel upgrade tool catctl.pl in Oracle Database 12.2.

Restarting a failed Database Upgrade with catctl.pl

And in case you will do a real Multitenant upgrade and fail – as it happened to me today due to “no space left on device” (no audit files could be written anymore) I tried the -R option as well based on Joe’s (our lead catctl.pl developer) recommendation:

$ $ORACLE_HOME/perl/bin/perl catctl.pl -n 6 -R -l /home/oracle/mike2 catupgrd.sql

Argument list for [catctl.pl]
Run in                c = 0
Do not run in

Upgrade Everything at Once – Multitenant Upgrade from Oracle 12.1 to 12.2

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 Single-/Multitenant Upgrade / Migration 20

I did blog about this topic a while back.

Upgrade PDBs – Everything At Once (Full CDB Upgrade)

Theory is nice but it’s a big difference when you do it the first time with a non-lab deployment at a customer with a real Multitenant database with almost 100 PDBs.Then you learn that neither the documentation nor my previous blog post contain all the necessary steps.

My test setup

I have a simple deployment of just 5 PDBs. But it will showcase with my limited compute capabilities how the process should work.

SQL> show pdbs

    CON_ID CON_NAME			  OPEN MODE  RESTRICTED
----------

Multiple hop upgrades? Execute the matching preupgrade scripts for each hop

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Upgrade / Migration 0

We discussed an interesting upgrade case last week together with our upgrade colleagues in Support – and learned the double-hop (or triple-hop) upgrade case is not described in the documentation somewhere.

What is a multiple-hop upgrade?

Triple Jump – Willie Banks – Olympics 1988 Seoul

Actually this describes the case where somebody can’t upgrade directly and has to do several upgrades in a sequence to reach the targeted release. For example, you start of with an Oracle 10.2.0.3 database – and your targeted release is Oracle 12.2.0.1 . A direct upgrade is not possible. I would opt now for Data …

Upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2 and Converting it into an 12.2 PDB (plugin)

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich catctl.pl Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 Oracle Database 12c Single-/Multitenant Upgrade / Migration 18

2 customers requested a bit more explanation on how to:
Convert and Plugin an Oracle 12.1 non-CDB database into an Oracle 12.2 container database

Cool, I like that 🙂 I will do this right away and use the approach to Upgrade first, then Plugin afterwards.

Upgrading an Oracle 12.1.0.2 database to Oracle 12.2.0.1

First the preupgrade.jar must be executed – please download always the most recent version from MOS Note:884522.1 as the version we publish is usually newer including important improvements (and fixes) than the version you’ll get with the release drop. We are working on including always the …

Upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2 – New MOS Notes

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich MyOracle Support Upgrade / Migration 23

Some very helpful MOS Notes got published regarding the upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2.0.1:

Furthermore check regularly for Known Issues and Alerts – currently the note has no content but exists already:

MOS Note: 2239820.1
12.2.0.1 Base Release – Availability and Known Issues

Cheers
–Mike…

February 2017 version of PREUPGRD.SQL is available

Posted on February 3, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Oracle Database 12c Upgrade / Migration 0

The new version of the preupgrd.sql (including the utluppkg.sql package) in its February 2017 version is available for download from MOS Note:884522.1.

New Preupgrd.sql - MOS Note 884522.1

If you are going to upgrade to Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 please exchange your current preupgrd.sql/utluppkg.sql either in ?/rdbms/admin or in the location of the source system you’ve copied it to with the new version.

–Mike…

Create a database with NON-DEFAULT Time Zone

Posted on December 8, 2016 by Mike.Dietrich DBCA Time Zone - DST Transportable Upgrade / Migration 2

One requirement of Transportable Tablespaces (and of course Full Transportable Export/Import as well) is to have identical database character sets AND identical time zone settings.

Problem

Source database has a lower time zone setting than the default target database in the destination home.

Lets assume you’d like to migrate an Oracle 11.2.0.4 off IBM AIX and migrate it into Oracle 12.1.0.2 on an Exadata meaning Oracle Linux 6. The source time zone version if it has never been upgraded would be TZ V14 – whereas the new Oracle 12.1.0.2 database you’d create would get TZ V18 by default.

Time Zone Setting Oracle Database

Solution 1

Upgrade / Migration

AI models are great … somehow …

When and why should you attend?

A customer story

What’s the problem?

AutoUpgrade

It all starts with an upgrade

My Setup

RELOCATE and UPGRADE?

Improved preupgrade.jar for Oracle 12.2 and 18c

Oracle Database 18.3.0 Upgrade on premises

List of PREUPGRADE checks executed by preupgrade.jar

Upgrade?

What happens to components with OPTION OFF status during upgrade?

September 2017 releases of preupgrade.jar and preupgrd.sql are available

preupgrade.jar – Rel.7 – September 2017

How does an upgrade with Oracle Multitenant work?

Upgrading the PDB$SEED takes always longer?

Problem

Analysis

My test setup

What is a multiple-hop upgrade?

Upgrading an Oracle 12.1.0.2 database to Oracle 12.2.0.1

Problem

Solution 1

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