Our developers just published a new version of AutoUpgrade. Head over to My Oracle Support and download version 21.1.1.

The version says 21, but it can still upgrade your databases to lower release. So, you should use this new version to upgrade to Oracle Database 19c as well.

What’s New

A total of 48 enhancements and bug fixes made it into the new release. It has been 35 working days since the last release (and that includes Thanksgiving week) which means that the team has put in – on average – close to 1,5 changes into AutoUpgrade every, single working day. I find that quite impressive. And it really supports our message that you should always use the latest version of AutoUpgrade.

In My Oracle Support note 2485457.1 you can find a complete change log. Also, you can also visit the 21c New Feature Guide for additional information.

Unplug/plug Upgrade

The first things that I would like to highlight is unplug/plug upgrade. Instead of upgrading an entire CDB, you can now choose to unplug one or many PDBs, plug them into a higher release CDB, and upgrade the individual PDBs.

How do you specify to upgrade only one PDB? Use target_cdb and pdbs?

upg1.sid=CDB1
upg1.pdbs=PDB3
upg1.source_home=/u01/app/oracle/product/12.2.0.1
upg1.target_home=/u01/app/oracle/product/19
upg1.target_cdb=CDB2

When doing unplug/plug upgrades you must be aware of the COMPATIBLE setting in the higher release CDB. If COMPATIBLE is higher, when the PDB plugs in, COMPATIBLE will silently and automatically be raised by the CDB. This means that you lose the capability of doing downgrades and flashback database.

You can read more about unplug/plug upgrades in the documentation

AutoUpgrade and Oracle Data Guard

In addition, AutoUpgrade now detects that you are upgrading a primary database in a Data Guard setup. In that case, it will automatically defer redo log transport to the standby databases and disable the Data Guard broker. After the upgrade, the broker is automatically restarted, but you need to manually reconfigure the standby databases, and eventually re-enable redo log transport.

You might ask: Why don’t AutoUpgrade handle it all for me? This is to preserve your fallback capabilities. Even after a successful upgrade, you still might want to revert back to the old version. Let’s say your testing finds a critical issue. You might still have a restore point on the primary database, but what if – for some reason – flashing back fails? Then you still have your standby database which was disabled right before the upgrade.

You can read more about AutoUpgrade and Data Guard in the documentation.

More

A few hints for the interested reader to explore. Have a look at the config file option catctl_options. You can use that to control the level of parallelism for a specific upgrade.

Also, if you don’t want AutoUpgrade to handle your network files (e.g. sqlnet.ora, tnsnames.ora) you disable it using manage_network_files.

You can read more about those options in the documentation.

Conclusion

Get the latest version of AutoUpgrade and benefit from the many new features. Keep an eye out for additional blog posts that will dig deeper into the new features.