This is not a new finding – and it is a very rare error. But you may only find it days, months or even years after a TTS migration has been completed. You may see a rare corruption issue, and it may sleep in your database. The error pattern would be: ORA-600 [<objdchk>] and ORA-8103 errors can happen after TTS Import into 19c when you query certain data sets. A customer of ours has encountered this a two years after an xTTS migration in an archival database. And since my team works with a lot of large migrations, I think
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Transportable Tablespaces
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.
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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 …
Continue reading...Virtual Classroom Seminar 18: XTTS to the Extreme – Video and Slides and more
Thanks for tuning in on Feb 22, 2024 into our Virtual Classroom Seminar 18: XTTS to the Extreme – Video and Slides and more are now available. And thanks for being such a great audience with so many questions.
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Video Recording
As usual, you can access the full recording here.
Please find the entire contents section below in the video’s description. You don’t need to watch the entire seminar, you can also access only the sections you are interested in, or skip sections which are not on your focus.
- 00:08 – Welcome to
Migrating Flashback Data Archive (FDA) tables
This morning I received an email question from a customer asking whether there is support for the Migrating Flashback Data Archive (FDA) tables in Oracle 19c. And since this is not the first time I received this question, I thought it may be good to have a blog post about it.
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What is Flashback Data Archive (FDA)?
Well, google it. Actually I was looking for a link in our documentation but to my surprise I found the usual suspects such as Tim Hall’s excellent oracle-base page – but not much in our own doc …
Continue reading...We are hiring: Software Development Senior Director “Database Utilities”
This is the first time that I send out such a blog post. But since many of you read this blog, and a high number of people follow me on LinkendIn, maybe you’ll be interested as We are hiring: Software Development Senior Director “Database Utilities”. And it could be you!
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I can tell you by heart that you’d join one of the best teams in Oracle.
So please read the job description here – and if your profile matches plus you are looking for a new challenge, you should apply right away. You …
Continue reading...Transportable Tablespaces: Keep tablespace files read-only
When you Transport Tablespaces, you may be aware of a change in behavior a long while ago. When your tablespace import has been finished, a tablespace will be taken read-write automatically. But there may be situations when you’d like the previous behavior. Now you can have this with Transportable Tablespaces: Keep tablespace files read-only.
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Default Behavior
Since Oracle Database 12c a tablespace will be taken read-write once the meta data import has been completed automatically. This was different in previous database releases. We used the technique a long time ago for a telco provider …
Continue reading...Test Transportable Tablespaces without Read-Only Mode
From time to time I deal with Transportable Tablespaces as an upgrade and migration approach. But TTS has one major flaw, especially when databases get really really big in the 3-digit-terabyte sizes or more: You will need to switch your tablespaces into read-only mode. But since Oracle Database 19c, you can Test Transportable Tablespaces without Read-Only Mode.
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Transport Constraints
Transportable Tablespaces (TTS) is a very common technique, especially when you need to migrate databases across Endianness. Since Oracle 10g, TTS works even from Big Endianness to Little Endianness platforms, and vice versa. Only if …
Continue reading...Upgrade to Oracle 19c – Virtual Classroom Series – Parts 5 and 6
October will be a very busy month. Daniel and I are putting the slides together at the moment for the upcoming Upgrade to Oracle 19c – Virtual Classroom Series – Parts 5 and 6. We will speak about “Database Migration Techniques” and about “Move to the Cloud – For Techies Only“. No worries if you missed Parts 1-4 as you can watch all of them online on-demand. Find all links below.
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Register for the Virtual Classroom Part 5 and Part 6 events
Find the overview for both events here …
Continue reading...Transportable Tablespaces – Example and strange error with a PDB
Yesterday I was browsing around for a useful simple example to test Transportable Tablespaces. A colleague mailed with the other day with a strange error message. The attempt to import into a PDB in Oracle 19c failed. My first thought: Oh, this is simple. But I failed, too. And even worse, I couldn’t find a single useful note in MyOracle Support (MOS) for ORA-31640, ORA-27037, Linux-x86_64 Error: 2 with Additional information: 7. So I decided to summarize this in Transportable Tablespaces – Example and strange error with a PDB.
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A simple Transportable Tablespace
… Continue reading...Collection of EBS upgrade information for Oracle Database 19c and 26ai
This was the question I received the most often during the Virtual Classroom web seminars last week: “Can you say something about EBS upgrades with 19c?”. And I promised to publish a blog post about it. But as I’m not an EBS expert, I can only share a Collection of EBS upgrade information for Oracle Database 19c. For all further inquiries, please open an SR or get in touch with your Oracle contact.
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Recap – EBS and Oracle 19c
In September 2019, right before Oracle Open World, we announced the certification of EBS …
Continue reading...Different MOS Notes for xTTS PERL scripts – Use V4 scripts
A long time ago my colleagues published PERL scripts to assist especially with cross platform Transportable Tablespace migrations. The PERL scripts allow you to utilize incremental backups. This way you can decrease the downtime in a migration with large databases significantly. But there are different MOS Notes for xTTS PERL scripts available. Which one should you take?
Transportable Tablespaces and Incremental Backups
The biggest pain points in a transportable tablespace migration are usually the size of the database and its complexity. With RMAN Incrementally Rolled Forward Backups you can tackle the size aspect. Instead of having a long downtime …
Continue reading...Transportable Tablespaces – Does it work between SE2 and EE?
I thought I had blogged about this topic already. But it seems to be that I stored this information somewhere else. Randomly I receive this question: Oracle Transportable Tablespaces – Does it work between SE2 and EE?
In addition often the question gets precised: Does it work in both directions or just one-way?
Transportable Tablespaces and Full Transportable Export/Import
Please find more information about these two very common Oracle database migration features:
- Transportable Tablespases: Character Sets – Same same but different? (May 25, 2016)
- Transportable Tablespaces and Read-Only in Oracle 12c (Dec 2, 2016)
- Full Transportable Export/Import – Things
PERL scripts for large migrations supported on all platforms (except Windows)
This topic fits very well as I present about +100 TB migrations today at the “Harmony” User Group Conference in Finland.
Finland in May
The question whether the PERL scripts for RMAN incrementally rolled forward backups we deliver via MOS Note 1389592.1 (11G – Reduce Transportable Tablespace Downtime using Cross Platform Incremental Backup) will be supported for migrations to non-Exadata systems such as Oracle SuperCluster as well.
And yes, now we got an update into the note saying:
Although preferred destination system is Linux (either 64-bit Oracle Linux or a certified version of RedHat Linux), this procedure can be used …
Continue reading...Can you EXCLUDE tablespaces from Full Transportable Export/Import?
Question: Can you EXCLUDE one or more tablespaces when doing a Full Transportable Export/Import?
First of all, this question came up already twice in real world customer migrations. So it’s not a totally unusual question. In one case a tablespace called USERS got precreated and some data did get stored. In the second case we did use RMAN incremental backups to migrate a very large database (>100TB) and some tablespaces weren’t part of the backup set.
I did brainstorm with Roy – and I dug into my notes from some years ago when the question was raised to me as …
Continue reading...Transportable Tablespaces and READ ONLY in Oracle Database 12c
We recently worked with a customer who noticed that they were not able to use transportable tablespaces to connect the same tablespace data files to two databases at the same time, even after setting the tablespaces READ ONLY in SQL*Plus. This is new behavior in 12c, and many customers are not yet aware of this change. Here are the details of what changed, why, and how you might want to deal with it if the changes affect your environment.
What Changed?
Starting in 12.1, data pump sets tablespaces read write during the import phase of a transportable tablespace …
Continue reading...Transportable Tablespaces – Characters Sets – Same same but different?
All credits go to Don Wolf, an Oracle Advanced Customer Support engineer from Ohio as he dug out this information 🙂 Thanks Don!
Do database character sets have to match EXACTLY for Transportable Tablespaces?
That sounds like a simple question. When you look into our big slide deck the answer will be a straight “Yes”. No doubts. Regardless if you would like to do Transportable Tablespaces or Full Transportable Export/Import your sources and your target’s database character sets must be equal. Otherwise Data Pump won’t allow you to process the meta data import.
But Don was wondering about slightly differing …
Continue reading...Data Pump – Exclude Stats differently for TTS and FTEX
Nice little best practice for statistics and Data Pump when doing either Transportable Tablespaces or Full Transportable Export-Import (credits to Roy and Dean Gagne).
Transport Statistics via a Staging Table
First of all we always recommend to exclude statistics when doing a Data Pump export as the import of such stats takes way longer than transporting them via a stats table. If you are unfamiliar with transporting stats between databases please see the Oracle Performance Tuning Guide with a nice tutorial:
The basic steps to transport statistics from one database to another fast and
Note:1389592.1 Public – Speed Up Cross Platform Transportable Tablespaces (xTTS) with RMAN Incremental Backups
As we have already mentioned in our recent workshops the MOS Note:1389592.1 is public now:
- MOS Note:1389592.1
Reduce Transportable Tablespace Downtime using Cross Platform Incremental Backups
This technique currently works for migrations to Linux64 and is supported by Oracle Support for Exadata migrations only. It utiliuzes RMAN incremental backups to reduce the large amount of downtime it takes to copy and convert the datafiles cross Endianness.
Two requirements must be met to use this new functionality:
- Oracle 11.2.0.2 plus Exadata BP12 (patch 12982245)
- One-off patch 13340675 contains the RMAN extension and is currently available on top of BP12 on
