How We Upgraded our Oracle 9i Database to Oracle 10g Database with Near-Zero Downtime

Dear all,

My article has been accepted and is published under Metalink's Customer Knowledge Exchange Program. The title of my article is "How We Upgraded our Oracle 9i Database to Oracle 10g Database with Near-Zero Downtime" and the Metalink note id is 431430.1.

Abstract of the document:

An Oracle database upgrade is a process of transforming an existing Oracle database into a later or the current release of the Oracle Database. This upgrade process normally requires a significant amount of database down time. This task of upgrade becomes more difficult for businesses which need to be 24*7 operational and any outage negatively affects business operations and customer service. In 24*7 organizations like Banks the database availability is so crucial that the downtime is bargained in minutes.

Minimizing downtime is a challenge every organization faces. With the advent of Oracle Streams, this challenge merely remains a challenge. Oracle Streams replication enables us to perform an upgrade with near-zero downtime. This is accomplished by configuring Oracle Streams on the existing Oracle 9i database which captures all the changes on the source database and replicates the changes to the target database (Oracle 10g). The rest of the document presents a step-by-step approach of setting the Oracle Streams replication and performing an Upgrade to Oracle 10g database.

Have a look at it and pass your comments.

Happy reading :)

Updated: 14 May, 2008