RE: 10g upgrade survey

I'm reviving this topic because I happen to have a real-life need to do another 10g upgrade and in planning I came up with a couple more benefits of using exp/imp:  

1. You can retain your old version of the database, completely unchanged, as a fallback in case of problems during/after the upgrade.
2. You can go directly from any version to 10g, rather than having to be on 8.1.7.4, 9.0.1.4+, 9.2.0.4+ or 10.2.0.2+, which are the prerequisites for a direct upgrade to 10.2. In my case, I've currently got about 50 databases all running on 8.1.7.3 - do I want to go through the trouble of patching them all to 8.1.7.4 just as a stepping stone to 10g, or just go straight to 10g via exp/imp? I think I'll go for the shorter path.

Also, I found these comments from the 10.2 upgrade guide http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14238/preu p.htm#BABFHFIJ:  

Export/Import Benefits

Upgrading using Export/Import offers the following benefits:

• Defragments the data - you can compress the imported data to improve performance.
• Restructures the database - you can create new tablespaces or modify existing tables, tablespaces, or partitions to be populated by imported data.
• Enables the copying of specified database objects or users - you can import only the objects, users, and other items that you wish.
• Serves as a backup archive - you can use a full database export as an archive of the current database.

Regards,
Brandon

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Dennis Williams Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 6:31 PM
To: Oracle Discussion List
Subject: Re: 10g upgrade survey

List,

Here are the results as I tally them so far.

Favorite upgrade method: Manual by a whisker (favored by 7 vs. 6 DBAs, as I count them, double counting some people who favored both methods)

A close runner-up was Exp/Imp.

Naturally if you have a large database and a short downtime window, exp/imp may not work for you.

One person stated he had used dbua successfully many times. Three others stated they were bitten by dbua.

Thanks for everyone's input.

Dennis Williams

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