Why do you “want” to upgrade and Why Should you upgrade now? Are equally important for you to consider when taking this crucial decision on the most critical technology for your organization. Your Database.
One of the strong drivers which is leading several database leaders to upgrade to the latest and greatest version 19c is that Oracle Database versions 12.1.0.1 and 12.2.0.2 extended support ended on July 31, 2022. Other key drivers are “You must Patch” and keep it secure, if you don’t patch you stand a chance to lose millions. The new features study is important to make the relevant business case for your organization.
Many application leaders do not know the key de-supported or deprecated features running on their Oracle Database, which lowers any new initiative or innovations which in turn lowers the return on the investment of the ERP. For an upgrade business case new features are equally important.
What you must do before an upgrade – Check OS, check certification, check application compatibility, check supported releases, check the upgrade path, and which expert team / partner you want to engage for this crucial activity.
When you start your journey on the database upgrade below are the key Best Practices which you should keep in mind:
1. Testing Strategy in place
Testing improves quality and reduces cycle times by optimizing test efforts, providing early feedback about the quality of release candidates and improving consistency. If there is any chance of failure the Testing will throw a red flag. Before you test Clone your production database on a machine with similar resources, Use DBUA for your upgrade, Run your application and tools to ensure they work.
While it is important to test the upgrade, you also must test the application, recovery strategy, functional testing as well. Ignore this best practice on your own peril.
2. Performance Analysis
You have to monitor and optimize your database and ensure it maximizes the utilization of the resources as per your applications needs. In the pre-upgrade planning phase a set benchmarks baselines so that the minimum expectation is known to compare with post upgrade performance. After the upgrade Compare metrics before and after upgrade to catch issues. You can read general and platform specific release notes to catch special cases.
3. Automate your Upgrade
If you have multiple databases and spread across geographies, the best practice dictates to enable upgrade by one database at a time. This will reduce any sudden disruptions to users and give enough time for course corrections. When you succeed with the first, document well and build methodologies & with scripts to ease the next step. Testing and Database upgrade Automation saves time, costs and helps you build confidence in the users of data safety.
4. Leverage Optimal Flexibility Architecture (OFA)
This helps you to configure databases to allow multiple databases, of different versions to organize database software, owned by different users to coexist. Optimal Flexible Architecture assists in identification of ORACLE BASE with its Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) diagnostic data to properly collect incidents.
5. Avoid Upgrading in a Crisis
Recovery plans ensure the organization’s ability to survive disruptions. An exercise management strategy provides a comprehensive approach to assessing the effectiveness of data recovery plans. Prepare and plan each and every stage well in advance. Ensure you have the right experts with a couple of upgrade projects under their kitty to predict and advise your action for the next move. They must have the knowledge of the security alerts, critical patches needed by your organization, The limitations and new features in the latest versions.
Pre-plan each move well in advance and ensure first-time-right upgrades with database experts or third-party Oracle database expert partners. How do you engage one?
Leveraging all the above best practices and more, IT Convergence has devised the methodologies to reduce the steps required to upgrade your database to Oracle Database 19c in One Click Upgrade.
And we have successfully upgraded databases of global enterprise customers. Speak to our experts now more about our Oracle Database One Click Upgrade.