Re: 10g upgrade survey

> On 3/5/07, Jeremiah Wilton <jeremiah_at_ora-600.net> wrote:
> >
> > I don't agree with the majority of respondents to the list who like to
> > use the exp/imp method to upgrade their databases. Why, in the absence
> > of real necessity, would one completely unload and reload their data,
> > rather than just running the upgrade script?
>
>

I also agree with Mr. Wilton. Having said that, I did run into a situation where I needed upgrade my database to 9.2.0.8 and also migrate from a 32-bit to 64-bit Linux server. Unfortunately, there was no 32-bit version of 9.2.0.8 for Linux and no 9.2.0.5 for 64-bit. Oracle support recommended exp/imp saying that was the only method they supported for what I needed to do, but I did not have a migration window large enough for that task given the size of our database and the speed of our old server.

What it came down to was developing procedures and testing them until I was confident they would produce the desired results. I would imagine that would apply to any kind of migration. Test, test, test, and then test again. I insisted that I be allowed the time to adequately test the procedures. I didn't call it success until I had completed the task 3 times consecutively without errors AND had QA test all pieces of the application against the new database. QA did find some minor problems with the code that had apparently been afflicting our customers for some time, but no one thought to tell the developers. The result was a migration/upgrade that completed two hours ahead of schedule with no database issues once we opened it up for our customers. I intend to follow a similar process when I upgrade to 10g, except I will test against a small database that only I use first.

Sandy

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l