RE: Scheduled Maintenance Windows & Database Change Management

I support an EBS environment and we have monthly maintenance weekends. The downtime can be anywhere from 4hrs to 48 hrs depending on what we are doing. Most of the outages are in the 18hr range. When we upgraded to 11.5.10 shortly before xmas the downtime was about 48 hrs. In a couple of weeks we are upgrading to 10.2.0.3 with security patches(app and db) and some release items. Including testing effort I believe the window will be 24 hrs.  

We have certain windows in which we can't perform maintenance. If anything needs to be done in that time frame then it requires exec signoff. End of the day, I've never really had any issues with securing downtime. I've had more issues with making sure there is enough time for testing the patches/fixes before they go in.  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carlson,Todd Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 10:50 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Scheduled Maintenance Windows & Database Change Management  

Hey Guys,  

We are a 24x7 shop (10.2.0.3 on Solaris 9) with several mission critical databases. Our main database supports our E-Business Suite (11.5.10.2) environment. We currently have monthly scheduled outages that typically last 6 hours. I manage the DBA/ERP team and we are under pressure to patch/implement more, but the business is REALLY pressuring us to have less and shorter scheduled outages. Obviously, this is a mutual exclusive situation, but logic doesn't always work...  

So, what I would like to know is for 24x7 shops, do you have regularly scheduled maintenance windows to apply patches, perform maintenance, etc...? If so, how long and how often are they? If not, do you have an environment that allows for rolling upgrades?  

My other question is related to versioning DDL object changes. Do you version control non-PL/SQL objects? If so, what tools do you use for table level change management? Do you use ITIL standards for table level change management?  

Thanks!  

Todd Carlson    

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