Friday, February 10, 2012

DBUA or Manual Upgrade ???

DataBase Upgrade Assistant or Manual Upgrade ???  If this question was asked to me a year or two back , I would have opted to use manual upgrade of oracle databases. DBUA in the past from my experiences had many bugs and issues. 
Once such experiences was DBUA helped me to upgrade on the Test and Development databases. On the production upgrade day it pulled my legs , I have to use the manual approach which I did not plan for.


Did Oracle make the DBUA better ? I think so yes. I used DBUA to upgrade three databases to 11gR2 and all went fine. Also I have made sure that all the pre-upgrade tasks are completely met so that the upgrade is not disturbed because of incorrect setting of some kernel settings or some missed operating system patches. Applying the PSU or CPU to the new Oracle Home also addresses some of the issues.


What has to be done when DBUA fails to do the upgrade ?
Well there are lots of reasons for the failure , but DBUA would stop the upgrade and then give back the option to continue with the upgrade manually after fixing the issue. There are other options that may help you to use DBUA again and rather spending time doing the manual upgrade. One such is to create a restore point prior to the upgrade and incase if DBUA fails in between , then you can restore the database to the flashback restore point and then apply the fix , retry DBUA.

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