Minimal Downtime Option for Upgrading Oracle 9i/10G Databases to 11G

This is just a “proxy” blog post with a new title. Yesterday I published “Migrating your 10G database to ODA with minimal downtime“.  However if you read it carefully the upgrade process described isn’t ODA specific. The only reason I used the title is the fact that the project I am involved in is Oracle Database Appliance  (ODA) based.

The process can be used  for most 11G upgrade projects. Very often a hardware got updated at the same time as a database version. In such case we migrate a database from an original location to a new server upgrading database version and sometimes changing operational system. If this is your scenario then you can use the upgrade process to minimize system’s downtime to 1 hour independently from size of the database you migrate. In fact the upgrade process can be used for:

• Upgrading Oracle database starting from version 9.2 to newer version
• Upgrading Oracle platform to different “bitness” (32 bit to 64 bit)
• Changing Oracle platform within a single “endian” (e.g. migrate from Windows to Linux) (2012.07.10 Yury: This options have limitations, please read the note carefully. Thanks to Jan for pointing it out.)

All with a short downtime. Have a look and and keep it in mind for the next upgrade project.