Get Started with Autoupgrade

Upgrade 2 Minutes

If you never upgraded a database or it has been a while since you did it, I suggest that you get familiar with AutoUpgrade. Other methods of upgrading still exist, but AutoUpgrade is the only recommended method!

How To

AutoUpgrade is a tool that comes in a single file named autoupgrade.jar. You find it in your Oracle Home in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin. You should always download the latest version of AutoUpgrade from My Oracle Support and put it into your Oracle Home, thus overwriting the existing file.

AutoUpgrade is fully backward compatible, and a newer version of AutoUpgrade can upgrade databases to a previous version. In this example, AutoUpgrade is version 21.3.211115, but notice the information in build.supported_target_versions:

$ java -jar autoupgrade.jar -version

build.hash 081e3f7
build.version 21.3.211115
build.date 2021/11/15 11:57:54
build.max_target_version 21
build.supported_target_versions 12.2,18,19,21
build.type production

Version 21 of AutoUpgrade can upgrade your database to Oracle Database 21c and previous releases.

Now, you are ready to analyze your Oracle Database for upgrade readiness and eventually upgrade it. This short YouTube video explains the process.

Finally, you can watch a short demo of a database upgrade.

Try It

But the best way to learn is to do it yourself. You can use our Hands-On Lab for this purpose. You can find an overview of the lab and the lab instructions on Mike Dietrich’s blog.

You can run the lab in two ways.

VirtualBox image

The Hands-On Lab comes as a self-contained VirtualBox image that you download and run on your own computer. It requires around 100 GB of disk space and a fairly modern computer. Nothing fancy, but it doesn’t run smoothly on arcane hardware. Get started here.

LiveLabs

You can run the entire lab in just a browser using Oracle LiveLabs. You can do it in our Cloud Free Tier so that it will be completely free. Our workshop on Oracle LiveLabs is called Hitchhiker’s Guide for Upgrading to Oracle Database 19c.

Watch this video and learn how to provision a lab in Oracle LiveLabs.

Guided Tour

If you get stuck in the lab or just want to watch and let Mike Dietrich do all the typing, you can watch this recorded session of the complete hands-on lab.

Further Reading

Once done with the lab, you can start on these additional ressources:

Good luck!

P.S. Remember – it is better to fail in our lab than in production…

Published

2 thoughts on “Get Started with Autoupgrade”

  1. Hi Daniel!
    Sorry for asking a question an the quite old post, but it is the latest post of autouprade B-)
    I have read autoupgrade documentation and your posts and got not trivial question. For example we have 11.2.0.4 running database, and we want to migrate it for tests to 19c on other host with autoupgrade tool. All information I have read tell me that I need to run “autoupgrade fixup mode”, but source database is the critial database and fixup mode makes some changes on it – so it is not desirable to run any changing script on this database. Also I read that after copy files to new host (I use rman backup/restore procedure and open copy database with resetlogs) I can run “autoupgrade upgrade mode”, but in this mode it do not fixups. So how can I run fixups on copied database before “auto upgrade upgrade mode”? Does this task have any working solution?

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  2. Hi Vadim,

    Then you must install 11.2.0.4 on the target host. Restore the database to that Oracle Home and run the fixups there.

    Alternatively, if you have a standby database, you can convert it to a snapshot standby, perform the fixups, do a backup and then convert standby back to physical. Use the backup for your test system.

    The fixups require that you start the database in the “old” release.

    Regards,
    Daniel

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