Use Inclusion or Exclusion Lists for PDB Upgrades

If you want to upgrade a subset of earlier release PDBs, then use inclusion or exclusion lists to avoid reupgrading the CDB or PDBs that are at the new release level.

Oracle recommends that you record the containers that you upgrade, and use inclusion or exclusion lists to exclude these containers from successive bulk upgrades. Excluding upgraded containers from successive bulk upgrades ensures that the upgrade only runs on PDBs that require the upgrade. Avoiding reupgrades minimizes the overall upgrade time, and avoids unnecessary unavailability.

For example: If you have installed Oracle Database 12c Release 12.2.0.1, then the containers CDB$ROOT, PDB$SEED, and any other PDBs created when the CDB was created, are part of the new release multitenant architecture. If you upgraded a CDB, and at the same time upgraded a set of PDBs to Release 12.2.0.1, then you do not need to upgrade either the CDB containers or the upgraded PDBs again.

In either case, when you plug in earlier release PDBs and then upgrade them, upgrade the PDBs with either an exclusion list, or an inclusion list:

• Use an inclusion list to specify only the set of PDBs that you want to upgrade.

• Use an exclusion list to exclude the CDB and PDB containers that are already upgraded.

If you do not use an inclusion list or an exclusion list to limit the upgrade scope, then the Parallel Upgrade Utility (catctl.pl) attempts to upgrade the entire CDB, not just the PDBs that require the upgrade. During that upgrade process, your system undergoes needless downtime. The inclusion list and the exclusion list options are mutually exclusive.