Oh … it’s just a few weeks left until Oracle Cloud World 2022 will start on Oct 17, 2022 in Las Vegas. If you have some final doubts whether you should go or not, let me tell you that it’s like Oracle Open World just under a different name. And in a different place. But with the same cool people and many great talks. Take the chance to meet the developers, their managers and the product managers behind the features you daily use – or miss. We’ll be there – and this is YOUR chance now to sign up for …
Continue reading...Performance
Intel uses AutoUpgrade to upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to 19c
Funny, I was traveling recently with RAC PM Anil Nair – but he forgot to tell me that this cool story has been published just a few days before we took of for YATRA 2022 to India: Intel uses AutoUpgrade to upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to 19c.

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What’s the story?
Gagan Singh, Enterprise Architect at Intel, shared it with me last week. The goal was to upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 19c with the least amount of downtime to minimize the impact on factory operations. Oracle ACS and the RAC PM team …
Continue reading...OC YATRA 2022 visiting 6 cities in India in July 2022
Yes, you read correctly in my blog post’s title: OC YATRA 2022 visiting 6 cities in India in July 2022. And it is already July. Just a few days to sign up – if you haven’t already. So please register here: https://www.aioug.org/ocyatra-2022
Just pick one of the six cities from the agenda page:
- 23 July 2022, Saturday – Chennai
- 24 July 2022, Sunday – Bengaluru
- 26 July 2022, Tuesday – Mumbai
- 28 July 2022, Thursday – Pune
- 30 July 2022, Saturday – Delhi
- 31 July 2022, Sunday – Hyderabad
And register yourself.
Please check out the awesome agenda with …
Continue reading...Binary patching is slow because of the inventory
The headline of this blog post may sound a bit cryptic: Binary patching is slow because of the inventory. But actually this seems to be one of the main causes when your binary patching gets slower and slower with every patch you apply.

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The more you patch, the worse it gets
Well, this is a tough headline. But you may have read my blog posts about my quarterly patching experience. It actually started with the July 2021 RU in my 19c environment when I wrote:
… Continue reading...At least in my environment, both checks with the
How to speed up your database and GI patching
Several of you mailed me already and commented. And I know that I promised this blog post for weeks, if not longer. So let me try to explain How to speed up your database and GI patching. Since this blog post has a longer history, I’d say far over 6 months, it will be a bit longer than the usual posts. At when I started writing it, I decided to split it up into several pieces to make it more digestible but also to allow easier finding of certain topics. I hope it may help easing some recent patching …
Continue reading...Virtual Classroom Seminar #14: AutoUpgrade 2.0 on May 5, 2022
If you finally want to see all the cool new features of AutoUpgrade 2.0 (the 2.0 is just a marker we use to say: We improved it significantly!), the please sign up to Virtual Classroom Seminar #14: AutoUpgrade 2.0 on May 5, 2022.

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What are we going to talk about?
The development team invested a lot of resources to implement some of the most wanted features in AutoUpgrade. Spoiler: One feature is still missing but will be released very soon. In this Thursday’s Virtual Classroom Seminar we will talk about:
- PDB and non-CDB
Some very important MOS Notes when you upgrade and patch
Today, I would like to publish only a short blog post with some hints to MyOracle Support (MOS) notes we find quite helpful. The idea of all these notes I will list below is to help you finding the right patches before you upgrade or patch to Oracle 19c. So see our collection of Some very important MOS Notes when you upgrade and patch below.

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Why do you need patch bundles?
At first, it is always our recommendation to upgrade to the most recent Release Update (RU). This is currently Oracle 19.11.0 while I’m …
Continue reading...Data Pump Super Patch for Oracle 19.10 and newer
Just a few days we released a Data Pump Super Patch for Oracle 19.10 and newer. “Newer” refers to the fact that once 19.11.0 will be available, this merge patch I’m writing about will be available as well right away (sorry, got delayed a bit). And if you work with Data Pump, you may want to consider this performance patch collection.

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Why do you need this patch?
Many customer will know the issue that adding changes with datapatch may take a long time as soon as dpload.sql is involved. And this …
Continue reading...Sign up for the Upgrade 19c Virtual Classroom Seminars for the US, Canada and LAD
It took a while. And many of you asked whether we will run our Virtual Classroom Seminars we ran successfully for Australia and New Zealand in April and from June to now in EMEA for the US, Canada and South and Latin America time zones as well. And we do. It’s time to Sign up for the Upgrade 19c Virtual Classroom Seminars for the US, Canada and LAD.

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Everything you need to know about Upgrade, Migration and Consolidation
When we ran these events especially for EMEA, a lot of colleagues asked us whether …
Continue reading...Cool Features not only for DBAs – Virtual Classroom Series No.7
Happy New Year to all of you. I hope you are all well. After an heavily active 2020 with more virtual seminars than ever before it’s time to start in 2021 with Cool Features not only for DBAs – Virtual Classroom Series No.7 on Jan 14, 2021.

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Why Cool Features for DBAs?
Actually the idea is not new. And we’ve included some slides into our workshops already for quite a while. But there are simply too many cool features. Our focus is in features which usually don’t make it into advertising or …
Continue reading...Virtual Classroom: Performance Testing Using the Oracle Cloud for Upgrades and Migrations
for May 19, 2021 – 10:00h CET
WE HAD TO MOVE IT FROM March 17 to May 19.
Virtual Classroom Web Seminar No.9:
Performance Testing Using the Oracle Cloud for Upgrades and Migrations
Everybody talks “cloud”, but what about the practicalities? We’ve already delivered a full 2-hour talk about how to migrate to the Oracle Cloud (“Move to the Cloud—Not Only for Techies”), and this time we’ll go beyond pure migration. How do you test? What are the best practices? And which special features can you expect in the various cloud deployments? We assume you have on-prem …
Continue reading...Oracle DB Upgrade Web Seminar (Deutsch) für CH
Wann? 15. September 2020 um 10:00h bis 12:00h
Wo? Leider nur virtuell
Was? Oracle 19c Upgrade Web Seminar
Was muss ich tun? Hier geht es zur Registrierung.
Mehr Information
Oracle DB Upgrade Webinar mit Mike Dietrich, Master Product Manager, Database Upgrades & Utilities
Als erste Langzeit Support-Version ist Oracle 19c “die” Version, mit der Sie Ihre Datenbanken aktualisieren können, um die neuesten Funktionen zu nutzen, viele davon ohne Extra-Lizenz.
In diesem Upgrade Webinar erfahren Sie, wie Sie Upgrades reibungslos planen und durchführen, mit AutoUpgrade Zeit
Upgrade Seminars 1 and 2 – A quick recap, slides download and more
Thank you for participating in the first two seminars. Roy and I did already the “Release and Patching Strategy” webinar on Tuesday, June 23. And today “AutoUpgrade to Oracle 19c”. So it time for Upgrade Seminars 1 and 2 – A quick recap, slides download and more.
Slides Download
I uploaded the slides already to https://mikedietrichde.com/slides/#WEB2020. Of course, I will upload the other slide decks as well to the same location.
Seminar Recordings
As soon as the recordings page has been completed, we will send out an email. And I will post the links …
Continue reading...Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c – Virtual Classroom Series
Roy and I delivered a similar seminar already for the Australia and New Zealand region. And now it is time at a more convenient time zone setting for EMEA and India. So if you are not tired of web seminars yet, please sign up for our Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c – Virtual Classroom Series.

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4 Web Seminars – Going far beyond upgrades
The idea for this series of 4 web seminars is to cover not only the database upgrade itself. You will get much more than technical upgrade information. And we will …
Continue reading...4+1 Seminars: Upgrade, Migrate, Consolidate to 19c – not only for Australia
Actually this weekend Roy and I would have flown from Australia to New Zealand. We planned at least 5 seminars. And we’ll do them in person as soon as conditions allow. If you are not tired yet of all these seminars offered to you, then we have the right offering for you.

Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash
And not only for those of you based in Australia and New Zealand. Singapore, Japan, Korea and other countries in this part of the globe. Roy and I will run for 4+1 Seminars: Upgrade, Migrate, Consolidate to 19c – not only for …
Continue reading...Unified Auditing policies can slow down the upgrade
I posted several blog posts about Unified Auditing in the past. And recently a large customer in the UK alerted me about their upgrades with PDBs from 12.1 to 12.2 taking much longer when Unified Auditing policies were enabled. It looks like as if Unified Auditing policies can slow down the upgrade.
We did some further investigations. See the results below.
Unified Auditing
You find a good number of blog posts explaining how to migrate to Unified Auditing, the performance tweaks in Oracle 12.1.0.2 and some other things:
… Continue reading...Unified Auditing – Performance Improvements in Oracle 12.1.0.2
Unified Auditing got introduced in Oracle Database 12.1.
The downsides of the “old” auditing facilities became obvious when too many users had activities or transactions at the same time leading to audit records being written into AUD$. Contention was a typical issue. The same thing happened when too many users tried to login at the same time. Furthermore protecting the auditing information required Database Vault as there was no default protection available.
This – and some other things – should be remedied by Unified Auditing which is available since Oracle Database 12c. It gets enabled in sort of a “mixed …
Continue reading...Different Metrics for SPA (SQL Performance Analyzer)
I’m more the command line type of person. Once I’ve understand what’s going on behind the curtains I certainly switch to the GUI-click-click tools. But in the case of Real Application Testing – even though the support via the OEM GUI is excellent – sometimes I prefer to run my procedures from the command line and check my reports in the browser.
Recently Thomas, a colleague from Oracle ACS Support, and I were asking ourselves about the different comparison metrics for the SQL Performance Analyzer reporting We did scan the documentation but we found only examples but no complete …
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