1. Cloud Control Database Lifecycle Management Administrator's Guide
  2. Database Maintenance: Updates (Patching) and Upgrades
  3. Upgrade databases and Grid Infrastructure Using Fleet Maintenance
  4. Prepare Your Upgrade

Prepare Your Upgrade

To begin preparing for your upgrade there is a list of actions to take place. You will need to create the image, subscribe targets to the image, deploy the Oracle Homes and check upgrade readiness.

The following is a set of steps that need to be done to properly prepare for your upgrade:
  1. Create image for new release: Based upon the upgrade route ( direct or indirect ), create gold image of that particular release. In case of direct upgrade route, simple create the gold image of the upgrade release. For more information see: Image Maintenance.
  2. Subscribe Targets: Use Fleet Maintenance Hub, EM CLI or REST APIs to subscribe the targets to the new image. For more information see: Subscription Tasks
  3. Deploy new Oracle Home: Deploy the higher version binaries of Oracle Home before your upgrade outage. Deploying a new Oracle Home will not interfere with your existing, in-use Oracle Database. Deploying the Oracle Home in advance will allow you to utilize the maximum outage window for the upgrade process. For more information see: Update Databases Using Fleet Maintenance
  4. Check for upgrade readiness: Ensure you have all the approvals to begin the upgrade,. Its always advisable to perform few iterations on non-production setup first and resolve any issues. During the production cut over, ensure that you document and apply all the fixes from non-production setup to production.