Re: 7.3.4 -> 8.1.6: Upgrade/Migrate? Or Install/Import

It is a classic case of trade-offs.
Circumstances/available resources may dictate the choice.

A migration is takes less time & requires less disk space. HOWEVER, it is kind of an "Alice through the looking glass" operation. If you start the migration, & have a "major" problem before it completes, your data base could end up as being unrecoverable. The recourse would be to restore from backup tapes.

An export/import will take longer to complete. Depending upon how much data is in the DB and how long your downtime window is, this may be a workable solution. However keep in mind that this approach will require essentailly twice the disk space as in the current database. The upside to this approach is that if there is a problem, you still have the original DB intact and the recovery should be quick & trivial.

At some point in the near future, I'll be upgrading my production database from V7.3.4, but I have a different plan than either of the two above. Since I have the "luxury" of running on mirrored volumes, I'll be splitting the mirrors & migrating only half the disks. If the migration succeeds, then I'll mirror the old half of the disks to the recently migrated disks. If the migration fails, I'll mirror the corrupted disks back to the original half.

HTH & YMMV!

Yexley Robert D SSgt AFIT/SCA wrote:
>
> Well, I didn't get nearly as much feedback on this as I would have liked to
> have, and thought I'd toss it back out there again to see if I could get
> anything else. Doesn't anyone have any opinions on this?
>
> -::YEX::-
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 9:55 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
> We are currently still running on Oracle 7.3.4.5.0 on Solaris 2.6, and are
> planning to upgrade to Oracle 8.1.6, and possibly upgrading the OS to 2.7
> also in the process, sometime in the near future. I wanted to throw a
> feeler out to get people's opinion on what would be the easiest, most
> painless way to accomplish this. I've read the installation and migration
> manuals, and it doesn't sound overly difficult to do, but I know that a lot
> of you out there have a lot more experience with this than we do, and was
> wondering what would be best for us between the following two choices:
>
> Option 1) Migrate the database by using the Oracle Migration tool (of course
> backing everything up first).
>
> Option 2) Backup server, Export full database, remove Oracle from the system
> completely, do a clean install of Oracle 8.1.6, then import the data into
> the new database.
>
> Part of this project is going to include a re-organization of our
> tablespaces, as we now have a few additional hard drives to use, and would
> like to spread things out a little better to improve performance by reducing
> disk contention. That part of the project was why I thought that it might
> just be easier to go with Option 2 instead.
>
> Of course I am also open to any other options anybody might have as well.
> Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance.
>
> SSgt Robert D. Yexley
> Air Force Institute of Technology
> Applications Services Division (SCA)
> -- Oracle Database Programmer/Administrator
> -- Configuration Management Officer
> -- Microsoft Certified Professional
>
> * E-Mail: robert.yexley_at_afit.af.mil
> * Voice: DSN - 785-6565 x-4268
> Civ - (937) 255-6565 x-4268
> Fax: DSN - 986-7080
> Civ - (937) 656-7080
> * http://sc.afit.af.mil/sca
>
> <)))><
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> ______________________________
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> Author: Yexley Robert D SSgt AFIT/SCA
> INET: Robert.Yexley_at_afit.af.mil
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-- 
Charlie Mengler               Maintenance Warehouse  
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