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. Often, a hardware is updated at the same time as a database version. In such cases, we migrate a database from an original location to a new server upgrading the database version and sometimes changing operational system. If this is your situation, you can use the upgrade process to minimize the system's downtime to 1 hour, independently from the 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 has limitations. Please read the note carefully. Thanks to Jan for pointing it out.)