Upgrade Oracle 11.2.0.3 to 11.2.0.4 Cloud Migration

As we all know, 11g and 12c, are officially out of support with no critical severity 1 patches being available without purchasing extended support. Luckily, 12.2.x is still available on Oracle Cloud w/ support and Vast Edge has been migrating its customers to OCI to help them take advantage of the extended support for 12.2.x till Dec 2023. As we all know, 11g to 12c is a major upgrade that requires the database architecture to be transformed from regular databases to containers (CDB) and pluggable databases (PDB's) in addition to the unavoidable encryption requirement. Although this multitenant architecture is great, it requires efforts to do the transformation without disrupting your business.

Vast Edge offers one of the most sophisticated and secure database migration, upgrade, and updates (ongoing patch management and minor updates). Vast Edge is a Global Oracle Cloud Partner and has been mentioned in Forbes for successfully migrating businesses to the cloud. Here is how Vast Edge performs the upgrades:

As we all know, Oracle does not support a direct upgrade from 11.2.0.3 to 12c, 18c, 19c, or the latest 21c versions (including autonomous databases). You have to be on 11.2.0.4 or higher to migrate to Oracle database 12c onwards. In addition to this 12.1 and lower versions only support offline encryption as online encryption was introduced by Oracle from 12.2 onwards. Hence, this is another bottleneck to do direct upgrades as Oracle cloud database requires all data to be encrypted for security reasons. In addition to this, the autonomous database takes security to another level where data is encrypted at transit and at rest.

There are multiple upgrade options available including golden gate (available for free on OCI marketplace), Oracle's zero downtime upgrade software tool, applying in-place patches for upgrade and selecting a new home to perform an install and then migrate data for a safer and mitigate risks while performing the upgrade. There's also an option to combine classic and integrated capture with golden gate gateway to go from 11.2.0.3 directly to 12c+ database versions. However, this process is more complex and requires higher technical skills and hours to perform the upgrade. In the following section, we are going to share with you some simple commands to upgrade from 11.2.0.3 to 11.2.0.4 (the least effort path to perform an upgrade that's compatible with Oracle Cloud). We advise that you perform this upgrade on prem as 11.2.0.3 can only be installed manually on OCI IaaS (computer VM's). Always remember one key point, i.e. Oracle cloud requires db to be encrypted and converting data to encrypted form is a time-consuming job. Hence, we would advise that you perform the encryption on prem prior to migrating your 11.2.0.3 db. If you are already on 11.2.0.4, you can set up a data guard to have your standby database encrypted on the cloud. Businesses can also accomplish this proven method of migration by leveraging golden gate to enable near zero downtime migration.

Our experts install the software in a separate home directory while creating a pfile from spfile. The specialists at Vast Edge run a pre-upgrade tool to check the pre-requisites before running the actual upgrade so that no setback occurs in the later stages of the upgrade. On top of that, we create a restore point in case of any crisis. Further, to avoid any kind of disaster Vast Edge also creates a Guaranteed Restore Point.