| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
 |
 | |||
| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
|
| |||
Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> oracle downgrade support
I have been reading the thread on tech support with some interest and =
was triggered to post.
We are currently in the middle of upgrading all our databases to = 9.2.0.4. Production databases are scheduled to start upgrading next = month and as part of our testing our management requires us to test and = document a downgrade procedure. This is mostly due to a situation that = occurred in our upgrade from 8.0.6->8.1.7 and hitting a crippling = performance bug in 8.1.7 that brought the business almost to a halt. We = struggled through a few weeks of fighting with Oracle support to get = them to accept it as a bug and when they did it was going to be a month = until they had a patch for it. During that time management decided they = could no longer live with the problem and we had to get back to 8.0.6 as = quickly as possible. Well the downgrade procedure failed miserably due = to another issue with the software and it was another week until we were = able to downgrade.
Needless to say management is a bit concerned about major upgrades and = being able to downgrade. Obviously if a major problem is found early = enough restoring the cold backup from before the upgrade is the best = option. But say the bug is not found for 1 week and Oracle cannot fix it = for 1 month.
According to document 208201.1 on metalink downgrading from = 9.2.0.1->8.1.7 is doable. Assuming that patch sets are mostly bug fixes = does that not imply that you can go from 9.2.0.4 to 8.1.7?
We have tested this with 2 databases that mimic 2 of our production = databases. Both have been unsuccessful with 1 having invalid sys objects = after the downgrade and the other getting ora-600's on materialized view = refreshes.
After opening 2 different tars with oracle for these issues they have =
both come back with slightly different answers 1) database downgrades =
are not supported 2) downgrading from a patch set is not supported =
(meaning 9.2.0.4) only downgrading from the base release of 9.2.0.1. =
There answer was in both cases to restore the cold backup from prior to =
the upgrade or import/export to downgrade.
Does it really seem correct that Oracle does not support downgrades or = are we just hitting bad information from support?
Scott Gamble
Oracle DBA - ERP and DB Technology Engineering=20
Cardinal Health, Medical Products and Services
(847)-578-5673 scott.gamble_at_cardinal.com
-- Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------Received on Wed Apr 07 2004 - 14:40:14 CDT
 |
 |