An outage-free upgrade?

From: Vsevolod Afanassiev <vafanassiev_at_aapt.com.au>
Date: 6 Aug 2003 01:10:26 -0700
Message-ID: <4f7d504c.0308060010.6505f49e@posting.google.com>

Is it possible to upgrade Oracle database without having a long outage? For example, I need to upgrade 8.16 -> 8.1.7. I can install the software in advance (it goes into another ORACLE_HOME anyway), but running upgrade scripts (u0801060.sql, jvmu816.sql, catxsu.sql) takes more than 1 hour. The database is not available during this period.

Is there any way to reduce this period to two short outages?

For example, I can set up standby database and use "switchover" functionality, but this means that at some point in time I'll need to apply redo logs generated for 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 database - most likely it won't work...

Even with Parallel Server/RAC all nodes have to run the same version...

So the only solution I could come up is to create triggers on ALL application tables that will capture all update/insert/delete activity, failover to standby, upgrade primary, and then use information captured by the triggers to "replay" the changes in the primary.

Thanks,
Sev Received on Wed Aug 06 2003 - 03:10:26 CDT