An alternative to shutting down the database is to prevent all users from accessing Oracle Application Express when upgrading your installation from a previous release of Oracle Application Express. Oracle only recommends this option in high availability production environments where planned outages are not available. For all other scenarios, the database should be shut down.
To disable user access to Oracle Application Express when the existing installation uses the Oracle HTTP Server with mod_plsql, you should either shut down the Web server or disable the Application Express Database Access Descriptor of the Web server.
Once you have prevented access from Oracle Application Express users, you should log in to SQL*Plus as SYS
, connecting to the database where Oracle Application Express is installed, and query V$SESSION
to ensure there are no long running sessions which would interfere with the upgrade process.