Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Overview of Maintenance

Oracle performs the maintenance of the DB system that starts within two hours of the weekly Maintenance window start time that you define for the DB system. The maintenance is performed only when needed instead of weekly.

The maintenance feature of HeatWave Service ensures continued security, performance, and stability of the service by:
  • Updating the database with security and critical fixes (within the same version).
  • Patching the underlying operating system.
  • Updating the firmware of the hardware and virtual machine hypervisor.
By default, the maintenance does not change the major and minor versions of the database, it may change the -u version. For example, 8.0.38-u1 to 8.0.38-u2. Only when the version of the database has become unavailable, the maintenance process performs an automatic minor version upgrade of the database. For example, when version 8.0.34 becomes unavailable on October 15, 2024, the database version will be upgraded to 8.0.35 (the next available version) in the following maintenance cycle after October 15, 2024.
Note

The maintenance process will NOT upgrade the database version unless the existing version has become unavailable. You have to manually upgrade the version of the MySQL server, such as from version 8.0.38 to 8.0.39. See Manually Upgrading a DB System.

However, for an Always Free DB system, the maintenance process will always upgrade the database version to the highest version available.

If you do not define the Maintenance window start time, Oracle defines one for you. See Editing a DB System for the steps to update the maintenance window start time of a DB system. It is recommended to confirm that the automatically selected window suits your timings. While the maintenance is going on, the DB system status changes to UPDATING and the DB system is unavailable for a short time. During this time, HeatWave Service does not monitor the metrics.
Note

The maintenance cannot start if a conflicting operation such as an automatic backup is currently running. It has to wait until the conflicting operation completes. If the conflicting operation does not complete within two hours of the maintenance window start time, the maintenance will be skipped and it will try again in the next maintenance window.

After the maintenance is complete, the DB system is returned to the pre-maintenance state. If the DB system is in the INACTIVE state when the maintenance starts, it is returned to the INACTIVE state after the maintenance completes.

For a DB system with HeatWave cluster, the maintenance process automatically recovers or reloads the HeatWave cluster data. See HeatWave Cluster Data Recovery.

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