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Upgrade Testing with a Refreshable PDB – does this work?

Yesterday, Daniel pinged me to discuss an upgrade testing scenario I had evaluated briefly by myself a while ago. I can’t remember why I gave up. But Daniel had some great ideas and tried already a lot in our OCI cloud. We want to use a refreshable PDB. And keep it up to date, then upgrade it. The idea of this approach: Whereas a CLONE or RELOCATE uses the initial command as the marker, a REFRESH would allow me to be way more in synch. So the question is: Upgrade Testing with a Refreshable PDB – does this work?

Upgrade Testing with a Refreshable PDB - does this work?

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Upgrade Testing – Online Clone a PDB to 19c

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

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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 …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Minimal Downtime Challenge

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Minimal Downtime Challenge

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Minimal Downtime Challenge

When we start to look at a migration from non-CDB to PDB for an important system, regardless of migrating on-prem or to the cloud, reducing the downtime is very important. In this blog post I’d like to highlight the different aspects …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Fallback Challenge

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB - The Fallback Challenge

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Fallback Challenge

As I work with customers on upgrades and migrations for a very long time, I know how important a proper fallback is.

When you attempt a migration from a non-CDB to PDB, you need to plan …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Various Pitfalls

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB - Various Pitfalls

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Various Pitfalls

In all the previous blog posts of this series I tried to explain specific pitfalls, and how you can workaround them. This article is meant to collect the “leftovers”, the minor issues and pitfalls which you may not …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Patch Level Pitfall

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB - The Patch Level Pitfall

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Patch Level Pitfall

When you consolidate on a larger scale, it is very likely that you have different patch levels in your database environments. But when you attempt to plugin a non-CDB into a CDB, you may see …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Component Pitfall

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB - The Component Pitfall

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The Component Pitfall

With component we mean the database component which you can find in DBA_REGISTRY – or CDB_REGISTRY. When Multitenant became available over 5 years ago, a decision had been made to make all options/components mandatory in a container database. This decision had to …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Time Zone Pitfall

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB - The Time Zone Pitfall

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The Time Zone Pitfall

Interestingly, there is no issue with different time zone settings within a single CDB. Your CDB$ROOT can be on DST V.32 whereas a PDB you plugin can be already on DST V.33. But only

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The COMPATIBLE pitfall

There are several pitfalls when you plugin a non-CDB into a CDB environment. I’d like to highlight some of them – and show you potential workarounds as well. This is part of a series of blog posts to make your migration from non-CDB to PDB a bit smoother.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB - The COMPATIBLE pitfall

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – The COMPATIBLE pitfall

When you migrate your non-CDB to PDB, in most cases the COMPATIBLE setting of the non-CDB will be lower than the setting of the receiving CDB. But still in this case you may see warnings. I will explain how to deal with …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Typical Plugin Issues and Workarounds

In the previous blog posts I showed different approaches on how to migrate your database on a same Endianness platform into Multitenant. Whether you prefer to upgrade first or plugin first is up to you. I recommend upgrading first as this allows you a seamless fallback. But regardless of which approach you prefer, you may take care on potential pitfalls. Hence, this blog post is about Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Typical Plugin Issues and Workarounds. It may not be complete when I publish it and I may extend it later on. Let me know if you have …

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Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Clone via NON$CDB, upgrade, convert

The third option for plugging in a non-CDB is called Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Clone via NON$CDB, upgrade, convert. As I showed already in this blog post a while ago, your source must be at least an Oracle 12.1 database. And this technique can be used also only for same-Endianness migrations but does not apply if you’d like to migrate from Big to Little Endian. If your source database matches already the receiving CDB, no upgrade is necessary.

Database Migration from non-CDB to PDB – Clone via NON$CDB, upgrade, convert

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High Level Overview

Endianness change possible:
No
Source database versions: Oracle 12.1.0.2
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Cloning with Pluggable Databases in Oracle 18c

We had several discussions on the internal mailing lists the other day about cloning with Pluggable Databases in Oracle 18c (or 12.2.0.1). And I blogged about this topic a while ago but realized I may need to refresh this a bit.

Cloning with Pluggable Databases in Oracle 18c

My example from the old blog post still works fine. But I realized that I switched my database into read-only mode. Hence, I like to repeat it and check different options.

Cloning a 12.1 PDB into Oracle 18c

In the source CDB1 I create a fresh PDB first, then open it and create a cloning user with the necessary …

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Cloning a PDB from Oracle 12.1 to Oracle 12.2

Is cloning a PDB from Oracle 12.1 to Oracle 12.2 possible?

A colleague raised this question recently. And a customer did ask me the same question a few days before at a user group conference. There are several ways to move a PDB from Oracle 12.1. to 12.2. But the documentation does not say explicitly if you can do a cloning operation between Oracle 12.1 and 12.2.

Please see also: Upgrade Testing – Online Clone a PDB to Oracle 19c

Cloning a PDB from Oracle 12.1 to Oracle 12.2

You can clone a non-CDB and make it a PDB but

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