Forum OpenACS Q&A: upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7

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1: upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 10/03/02 04:45 PM
Hello,

I need to upgrade a Sun server that is running Oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7.3
and this machine is running ACS 3.x as well. I need to preserve the
content of that tablespace ... What would people recommend? Is an
export form 8.1.6 importable in 8.1.7? Or should I think of something
else?

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2: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by C. R. Oldham on 10/03/02 04:54 PM
You can do an in-place upgrade and migration.  No export/import necessary.  Make sure you do a cold backup though.

This is not a trivial process, and I recommend doing the database migration by hand--my experience with the GUI migrator was that it had memory leaks and failed in the middle of the migration.

Is 8.1.7.3 the latest for Sun?  We're up to 8.1.7.4 on Linux...

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3: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 10/03/02 04:59 PM

8.1.7.3 is the one I got updated but I will check metalink to see if I can get the latest for Sun.

I will have a look at the migration steps, do you have any pointer for it, besides http://www.akadia.com/services/ora_migrate_816_to_817.html (got it from Google).?

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4: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 10/03/02 05:02 PM
I *always* do a fresh Oracle install and then use export/import to move the data.  This has always worked for me.  Frankly, I don't trust the quality of Oracle's migration process.

I don't know if this applies to Solaris, but the 8.1.7.4 patch for Linux causes problems with the INSO filters for interMedia, and I haven't heard of a fix being made available.  8.1.7.3 was ok here, so you might want to check carefully if you need the INSO filters (that is, the capability to index things like Word docs via interMedia).

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5: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 10/03/02 05:06 PM

Just to reply to my own question, http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle8i/doc_library/817_doc/server.817/a86632/toc.htm has a lot of information about migrating.

Janine, you say you use "export/import", is the format compatible then? I just want to make sure and not find myself with an "un-importable export file"... 😊

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6: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 10/03/02 05:11 PM
I've never had an un-importable export file, and I've been doing this since Oracle 8.0.5.  There's a first time for everything, I suppose, but this isn't a problem I've seen people talking about at Metalink either, so I think you're pretty safe.
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7: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 10/03/02 05:13 PM
Awesome! Thanks a lot Janine! I will try that!
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8: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 10/04/02 11:13 AM
Hi Bruno,
I would clarify the import/export thing here. In my experience, you can get problems if you do the import using a different version than your export. So, ideally you should export using version 8.1.7.3 of exp and re-import using the same version of imp. Of course, this may mean installing 8.1.7.3 to achieve this! (I may be mistaken on this - it may only be when importing back to an earlier version that problems arise, maybe going forward is ok, but I have seen problems with imports between versions.)
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9: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Jeff Davis on 10/04/02 11:28 AM
I have not had any problem with importing things exported with
older versions of exp.  One gotcha to watch out for is character sets
(i.e. you can't import an 8859-1 encoded DB into a utf8 DB without some very
evil tricks -- Branimir wrote up some notes on what he had to do to get
things to work in that case).
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10: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 10/04/02 12:18 PM

I am downloading Oracle 8.1.7 now ... :( sloooooow ...

The problem I had was exporting from Oracle 8.1.6 on Solaris and trying to import on 8.1.7 on Linux ... so I will do a complete backup of my 8.1.6, install a fresh Oracle 8.1.7 on Solaris and try to import the exported file from 8.1.6 ...

If that doesn't work, I will try to do the "migration from 8.1.6 to 8.1.7" .. but everything I read about it shows me that it's not as simple as the export/import :)

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11: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 10/04/02 12:22 PM
Well if you do the export with your 8.1.7 Linux client over SQL Net, you'll have some chance of getting it working!
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12: Response to upgrading oracle 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 (response to 1)
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 10/04/02 12:55 PM
Good idea ... :) Thanks!

The only problem is that the machine running Oracle 8.1.6 (Sun) is isolated and I can't use SQLNet to connect to it ... I just can transfer the files via sftp ... but I will give that a try with my other development machine

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13: Oracle 8.1.7.4 INSO filter problems? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 10/05/02 04:26 PM
Janine, could you give pointers to more info on these
8.1.7.4 Intermedia INSO filter problems on Linux, please?

Also, do you need the INSO filters in order to index PDF files with
Intermedia?  I don't recall off-hand, although I should check, and I
suspect the answer is yes.

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14: Re: Oracle 8.1.7.4 INSO filter problems? (response to 13)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 12/16/02 10:27 PM
There's some more info on those 8.1.7.4 Intermedia INSO filter problems on Linux in this other post.