Re: Minimizing downtime for 9i to 10g upgrade

From: Mladen Gogala <mgogala_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 14 Sep 2008 01:48:44 GMT
Message-ID: <48cc6d7c$0$1336$834e42db@reader.greatnowhere.com>


On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:07:13 +0000, Chuck wrote:

> I need to upgrade a 9i database to 10g but the business unit cannot
> tolerate any downtime. I've advised them the cleanest way is to upgrade
> the db in place which takes about 90 minutes. They are uncomfortable
> with that much down time. An exp/imp to a new 10g database would take
> even longer. Is there a simple straight forward way to do a major
> release upgrade without down time?
>
> One thought I had was to create a 2nd database using 10g, export the
> data from 9i to 10g (consistent=y) with users still udating the 9i
> database. Then comes the part I'm not sure of. Is there some feature in
> Oracle that will let me convert the log files from binary to SQL (sort
> of like mysql's mysqldump utility)? If I know the export started at scn
> X, I could convert all committed sql from scn x+1 and then apply it to
> the new database. It wouldn't be zero down time, but it would certainly
> minimize it. Is this possible? Or do I need to be doing something above
> the database layer to accomplish what I want?
>
> Another thought is again copying the data to a new 10g database but
> using transportable tablespaces instead. I'm just not sure that they
> would be compatible between 9i and 10g. Again it's not a zero down time
> solution but might be a lot faster than having the db down for the
> entire time that dbua is running
>
> TIA
I will have to do something like that in February 2009. So far, the company opted for the logical standby based upgrade which is described

here: http://tinyurl.com/6r8kem

There are also other options: you can create a physical standby and open it in read only mode. That way, the database would be available for reading but not for updates during the upgrade process.

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Received on Sat Sep 13 2008 - 20:48:44 CDT

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