Oracle Pre-Upgrade Utility
This is a guest post by David Clement, a veteran database engineer and a friend of mine. You can find him online at davidclement.org.
A handy feature that I’ve just found out about is that there is a link from Metalink document 884522.1 to the Oracle Pre-Upgrade Utility. You can get the utility without downloading the entire installation set and unpacking it.
For me, the easiest way to use the utility is to invoke the non-XML version from SQL Plus. For example:
SQL> conn sys/<password>@<tns_entry> as sysdba
SQL> spool utlu112_prereqs.out
SQL> @@utlu112i
....
SQL> spool off
The utility checks some interesting things:
- your core tablespaces, including System, Undo, Sysaux, and Temp;
- your init.ora parameters, to detect obsolete and deprecated parameters and hidden parameters;
- your timezone file;
- your dictionary statistics.
If you did unpack the entire installation set, the utility script is in rdbms/admin.
2 Comments | Filed in Oracle | Tags: 11g, upgradeI’m upgraded and updated
It is Sunday night and I’m sitting next to my wife Jasmine on the sofa in front of the TV. Jasmine is watching “Big Love” on HBO (a series about a guy who is married to three wives, poor guy!), and I have my laptop on my lap, trying to write some thoughts.
Well, I finally did it. I upgraded my blog to the latest WordPress version (currently at 2.0.2). And while I was at it, I also switched to a new WordPress theme. I hope you like it. I wanted to avoid changing the look of the blog, but the old theme was not compatible with WordPress 2.0. Moreover, I used a few new WordPress plugins, you can see all of them here.
Speaking of upgrades, take this simple example:
select nvl(nvl(nvl(null, null),null),4) from dual
What’s wrong with it? Well, having an “upgraded” database version, from 8i to 9i for example, gives you the option to write it like this:
select coalesce(null,null,null,4) from dual
Upgrades are good. But hey, upgrades are not as simple as they sound. Heck, I spent all Sunday afternoon and evening upgrading my simple and small blog. How long will it take to upgrade, not one, but multiple Oracle databases and make sure that nothing breaks in the process. Testing an upgrade is often the most time consuming part of the upgrade process.
