Oracle AutoUpgrade was made to make upgrading and patching easier. When doing so, there is a risk that we hide too much information and turn AutoUpgrade into a black box.

It has always been the intention that AutoUpgrade is fully transparent and enables you to see exactly what’s going on.

This new feature increases transparency by allowing you to get a list of all the checks that are performed before and after upgrading or patching.

How Does It Work?

1. Ensure that you have the latest version of AutoUpgrade:

   wget https://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/otn_software/autoupgrade.jar
   

2. Start AutoUpgrade and list all checks. Pipe the output into a file for easier reading:

   java -jar autoupgrade.jar -listchecks > autoupgrade_checks.txt
   

3. You can shorten the output to just one of the checks:

   java -jar autoupgrade.jar -listchecks ORACLE_RESERVED_USERS
   

Here’s the output from one of the checks:

Check : ORACLE_RESERVED_USERS
        Description : Oracle occasionally adds new internal USERs and ROLEs as the database evolves. To avoid a name conflict in the upgraded version, a source database must not contain any USER or ROLE with a name that matches one reserved by Oracle in the target release.
        Fixup Action : You must drop the following USERs or ROLEs from the database: {1}
        Severity : ERROR
        Fixup Stage : PRE
        Min Version(inclusive) Check applies : NONE
        Max Version(exclusive) Check applies : NONE
        Check Introduced Version : NONE
        Check Removed Version : NONE
        Manual Fixup or Automatic : MANUAL
        AutoUpgrade Only : NO
        Run for Datapatch : NO

• Severity may take one of the following values: INFO, WARNING, RECOMMEND, ERROR.
• Fixup Stage tells you when AutoUpgrade executes the check: PRE (before), POST (after)
• If Manual Fixup or Automatic is AUTO it means AutoUpgrade will fix any issues for you during fixups or deploy mode. Otherwise, it is something that the user must fix. Depending on the severity a fix is mandatory.
• If AutoUpgrade also executes the check during patching, then Run for Datapatch is set to YES.

How Can I Use the Information?

First, this feature adds transparency. We don’t want AutoUpgrade to become a black box.

Second, it allows you to correlate the information with your own runbook. Perhaps you are performing some of the same checks and that’s an opportunity to trim your runbook. I have seen this countless times when I talk to customers. Their runbook has evolved over many years and often contain checks that are no longer needed or executed by AutoUpgrade.

Final Words

At the time of writing, there are more than 200 checks in AutoUpgrade:

java -jar autoupgrade.jar -listchecks | grep "Check : " | wc -l

201

Happy upgrading!

Further Reading

• MOS note, Database Preupgrade tool (via autoupgrade.jar) check list (Doc ID 2380601.1)
• MOS note, AutoUpgrade Tool (Doc ID 2485457.1)