Re: Minimizing downtime for 9i to 10g upgrade

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:02:30 -0700
Message-ID: <1221512550.960909@bubbleator.drizzle.com>


Chuck wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:

>> Chuck wrote:
>>> DA Morgan wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>> Why? you can do TB systems in seconds.
>>>>
>>>> First set up your 10g database.
>>>> Then copy over all of the rows except for the last 24 hours.
>>>>
>>>> Then copy over all of the information not previously copied except for
>>>> the last hour.
>>>>
>>>> Repeat for everything except the previous 2-5 minutes.
>>>>
>>>> Then switch them over. This is the few seconds.
>>>>
>>>> Then bring in that last five minutes worth of transactions which likely
>>>> will never be missed in the minute or two it will take to capture them.
>>>>
>>>> This technique is aided by the use of partitioning and I highly
>>>> recommend several practice runs to perfect your technique.
>>> I think you must mean "terabyte" by tb. At first I thought you were
>>> talking about some software product by a company called "tb systems" :-).
>>>
>>> How do you automate the copy of rows to know which ones were updated in
>>> previous hour, 2-5 minutes, etc.? Are you suggesting converting every
>>> table in the database to a materialized view, with an mview log, and
>>> refreshing periodically? Is this supported across different major
>>> releases?
>>>
>>> I would think whatever you're talking about needs to be SQL based as I
>>> dont believe log shipping is supported between major releases.
>>>
>>>
>>> Can you please clarify? Thanks.
>> One way is to add a column to each table. Not pretty. Another is the
>> temporary use partitioning since the database will be blown away in
>> a week or less. A third way is with DBMS_WM (workspace management).
>> Give me a minute or two and I can likely come up with a few more.
>>
>> Again it all depends on what is going on, the size, dependencies, etc.
>> None of which were stated by the OP.

>
> I am the OP and it sounds pretty much like what I expected. There is no
> magic bullet solution. Whatever is done to minimize down time must be
> done above the RDBMS layer.
>
> The database is not extremely large - perhaps 35g. However there are
> approx 500 tables, 1000 indexes, 25 lobs, 100 sequences, but the real
> pain is the 300+ foreign key constraints.
>
> I'm not sure the effort and risk are worth saving perhaps 30 minutes of
> down time.
>
> Are transportable tablespaces compatible from 9.2.0.6 to 10.2.0.4 (same
> o/s and hardware)?

I am slightly embarrassed to say this but I don't know since I haven't seen 9.2.0.6 in about 5 years. It might be that it is and it might be that this was handled in 9.2.0.8 so check the docs.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
Oracle Ace Director & Instructor
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org
Received on Mon Sep 15 2008 - 16:02:30 CDT

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