Oracle Applications Upgrade – An Overview

For quite sometime now Oracle apps customers have been trying to upgrade their apps to latest version 11i (or Release 12 now). In this blog I will talk very basic about the upgrade process. How the upgrade process actually works. This is based on my experience with upgrade projects.

Some facts about the instance that was upgraded:
1. Database size before upgrade: 800 GB
2. Database version before upgrade: 8.1.7.4
3. Apps version before upgrade : 11.0.3
4. OS version used during upgrade: HP-UX PA Risc 11.23 (11i v2) with 32 CPUs.
5. Hardware used during upgrade: HP-UX PA Risc Superdome with 32 CPUs, 80 GB RAM
6. SGA size 12 GB (7.5 GB Buffer Cache, 2.7 GB Shared Pool)
7. Database size after upgrade: 1.3 TB
8. Database version after upgrade: 10.2.0.2
9. Apps version after upgrade: 11.5.10.2
10. This upgrade did not include migrating to OATM.

In general following are the technical tasks that need to be done to upgrade 11.5.10.2. (This post does not address upgrade to release 12). The complete details as to how to accomplish and upgrade can be found in the Oracle apps upgrade manual. Oracle Applications 11i (11.5.10.2) Docs

1. Download “The Upgrade Manual Script” TUMS from metalink. TUMS comes as a patch applied using adpatch. This provides a script adtums.sql and also load some objects in db that the script uses to examine your installation. The script reports the list of steps that do not apply to your instance.

Note: If you see the upgrade manual, you will find that Oracle has categorized the various steps involved in the upgrade starting from category 1 through 7, where category 1 and 2 are pre-upgrade steps, category 3 the upgrade and rest post upgrade steps.

3. Download or get the new 11i CDs(11.5.10.2 are the latest) and stage them. Make new mount points for 11i application tier in your application tier and for 9i ORACLE_HOME on database tier. If you have-or-is planning to use multi-node architecture, setup the new mount points on the machine which is your admin-tier. Rest of the tier can be cloned later on for sake of simplicity. Follow instructions in Chapter 4 of installation manual of Oracle apps Installation Guide
For an upgrade, Rapid Install installs an Oracle9i Release 2 RDBMS Oracle home without
a database. You will use this Oracle home to upgrade or migrate your existing database
to Oracle9i.

4. Under category-2 steps, run adpatch under newly laid application tier (11i) and install latest upgrade patches in pre-install mode. e.g. for this upgrade we applied 3993353.

5. Under category-3 steps, upgrade your database to 9i release2 and run autoupgrade (executable name is adaimgr from new 11i application tier). Autoupgrade (formaly know as autoinstall) is the ad utility that upgrades your database code and objects from 10.7 or 11 to base 11i (11.5.0). This is a time consuming step. At this point you have upgraded your instance from 10.7 or 11 to base 11i (11.5.0)

6. Under category-4 post upgrade step. Apply the latest AD minipack e.g. for this upgrade we applied:AD.I.4 (4712852) with adpatch options=nogenerateportion,hotpatch

7. At this point undet category-4 step only, apply 11.5.10.2 maintenane pack udriver which can be found under $AU_TOP/patch/115/driver with following options: adpatch options=nocopyportion,nogenerateportion.
This will bring your database code and objects from base 11i (11.5.0) level to 11.5.10.2 MP level.

8. At this point you have upgraded the database to 9i release 2 and application to 11.5.10.2. Rest of the steps like, installing online help patch, install additional patches for NLS, licensing new products etc… can be done now. After this you will have to again run Rapid-install from the stage area and run it to configure and start the application servers. Follow instructions in Chapter-4 paragraph “Conguring and Starting Server Processes” of the Applications Installation manual. Also as part of post upgrade steps, you can migrate your database to 10g release 2 and clone other nodes for your multi-tier setup.

The following diagram illustrate the theory behind the upgrade.

Note that you also cannot upgrade directly to 10g until the upgrade is over. This is because:
1. Your application tier may not be supported with 10g
2. Upgrade only works on 9i release 2 version.