Required Task to Preserve Downgrade Capability

To preserve the option to downgrade after upgrading your database to Oracle 12c release 2 (12.2), install the patch for bug 20898997 in your source ORACLE_HOME.

As part of your preupgrade plan, check your release to ensure that you can downgrade from an Oracle Database 12c release 2 (12.2) upgrade. To ensure that you can carry out a downgrade, you must have patch 20898997 installed in source ORACLE_HOME.

If your source Oracle Database Oracle home is not patched with patch 20898997, then it does not affect the upgrade. However, if you decide to downgrade the database, then the downgrade can fail. You receive an error message similar to the following:

ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [8153]

There is no workaround to continue the downgrade.

To ensure that you can downgrade your database, complete the following procedure:

1. Log in to your existing Oracle Database instance.
2. Run the following Opatch command on your existing Oracle Database home:

   $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch/opatch lsinventory -bugs_fixed |grep –i "20898997" 

   A successful result is similar to the following:

   Sub-patch  20898997; "XMLTYPESUP: QCTOXSNLB SHOULD NOT CHECK AGAINST SNAPSHOT SIZE"		
   	 

   If you do not see that the patch is installed, then proceed to the next step.

3. Log in to My Oracle Support with your support credentials.
4. Enter "20898997" into the Knowledge Base Search field.
5. Download the patch and patch Readme for your platform, and follow the instructions to install the patch on your database instance.
6. If you are patching more than one database, then repeat this procedure for each database instance before upgrading.