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. Data Guard Rolling Upgrade
  5. Prerequisites to Rolling Upgrades

Prerequisites to Rolling Upgrades

The following items should be considered before attempting a rolling upgrade:

  • Enterprise Manager Cloud Control supports rolling upgrade for database versions 11.2 and higher. An Active Data Guard license is required on the primary database and the physical standby database selected to perform the rolling upgrade.

  • The software for the upgrade version must already be installed and the new Oracle Home must already exist prior to performing the rolling upgrade. The Enterprise Manager Cloud Control rolling upgrade process does not include these steps.

  • For databases using Automatic Storage Management (ASM), ASM must be upgraded separately prior to performing a rolling upgrade, unless it is already at the required version. For 11.2 Real Application Cluster (RAC) or single-instance Oracle Restart databases, ASM and Grid Infrastructure share the same Oracle Home, so ASM is upgraded when the Grid Infrastructure home is upgraded. (The Grid Infrastructure version must be equal to or greater than the target database upgrade version.)

  • The databases that are in the Data Guard configuration must be discovered as Enterprise Manager targets.

  • The rolling upgrade workflow recommends performing a backup of the primary database, but the backup is not performed during the rolling upgrade process.

  • Automatic rollback of failed rolling upgrades is not supported. However, guaranteed restore points are created on all the databases such that the respective databases can be restored back to these restore points in case of failures.

  • Guaranteed restore points are created at appropriate points during the upgrade process, and are dropped once the rolling upgrade process has been successfully completed.

  • In order to proceed with a rolling upgrade of an existing Data Guard configuration, at least one physical standby database must already exist in the Data Guard configuration and be discovered as an Enterprise Manager target.

  • Unless explicitly specified, all required role changes are automatically performed during the rolling upgrade process to ensure that the original roles of the databases are restored after the successful completion of the rolling upgrade. An option is available to pause before the 1st switchover, and if there are no bystander standby databases in the configuration, there is an option to stop after the first switchover if you specify not to return the databases to their original roles.

  • Changes to unsupported data type objects are temporarily suspended for the transient logical standby database for the duration of the rolling upgrade process.

  • In order to proceed with a rolling upgrade to a particular database version, all the bystander logical standby databases in the configuration must first be upgraded to that version.