1. Upgrade and migrate a database to the cloud with minimal downtime
  2. Learn About Upgrading and Migrating a Database with Minimal Downtime

Learn About Upgrading and Migrating a Database with Minimal Downtime

You have a large, mission-critical database to migrate to the cloud and you need to upgrade the database to a supported version–and do this all with near zero downtime. Upgrading a database to a cloud-compatible version and migrating from on-premise to the cloud doesn't need to be complex or time-intensive. You can move the database to cloud along with upgrade to a cloud-compatible version and convert to a pluggable database (PDB) architecture with a fallback option.

Before You Begin

Before you upgrade and migrate a database, review the related design solution.

See Learn about reducing downtime during database migrations (Design)

Architecture

This architecture shows how to upgrade and migrate very large databases from an on premise system to a high performance system, such as Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service, in the cloud with minimal downtime.

Migrating databases to the cloud might require you to upgrade your Oracle Database to a more recent version. Beginning with Oracle Database 18c, databases in the cloud use an Oracle Multitenant pluggable database (PDB) architecture, so converting a non-pluggable database on premise to a pluggable database in the cloud might be another requirement during migration of your database to the cloud.

For consolidation and to meet higher performance requirements, migrating to the cloud might also involve migrating to an Oracle Exadata system in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

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Description of the illustration upgrade-migrate-db.png

In this scenario, we're using Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to perform the following tasks:

  1. Upgrade and migrate a large Oracle Database to a database version that is supported in the cloud. In this case, we're upgrading and migrating Oracle Database version 11.2.0.3 from on-premise to version 18c in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
  2. Move the database from on-premise traditional hardware to Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service.
  3. Convert the database from a non-container database (non-CDB) to a multitenant PDB architecture during migration to the cloud.
  4. Migrate with near zero downtime along with a fallback option for cutover with the use of Oracle GoldenGate.
  5. Move terabytes of data from on-premise to cloud quickly and securely.

About Migrating and Upgrading a Database to the Cloud

Beginning with Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Database Cloud Service supports multitenant pluggable database (PDB) architecture, which means you must convert a non-container database to a container database for cloud migration.

When migrating an older non-container Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 from on-premise to Oracle Database 18c on Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service, there are 2 high level steps:

  1. Upgrade the non-container database to a higher version non-container database.
  2. Convert the upgraded non-container database to a container database.

The first step is important and you must decide whether to upgrade the architecture on-premise or in the cloud. You might want to perform the upgrade on-premise to separate upgrade issues from cloud migration issues. But doing this on-premise may demand additional hardware and additional testing cycles. It might make more sense to perform the upgrade during the migration and perform just one round of testing on the final upgraded version of database in cloud. Upgrading during the migration is advantageous if you don't have hardware available on-premise to test the upgrade or if you don't have bandwidth to perform multiple cycles of testing on-premise and in the cloud.

For the second step, you can convert to a multitenant architecture directly in the cloud.

About Required Services, Products, and Roles

This solution requires the following services, products, and roles:

This architecture supports the following components:

  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region: Destination location in the cloud when migrating the database from on-premise.
  • Oracle Database: Source database on premise.
  • Oracle Database Cloud Service: Oracle Database in the cloud.
  • Oracle GoldenGate: Mechanism for capturing a replica of the on-premise Oracle Database and delivering it to the cloud.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute: Mechanism for accepting delivery of the replica database in the cloud.
  • Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service: High performance platform in the cloud. You have full access to the features and operations available with Oracle Database, but with Oracle owning and managing the Oracle Exadata Database Machine infrastructure. Each instance contains a predefined number of compute nodes (database servers) and storage servers, all tied together by a high-speed, low-latency InfiniBand network and intelligent Oracle Exadata System Software.

These are the roles needed for each service.

Service Name: Role Required to...
Oracle Database: root system privileges or sudo with the ability to run commands as root. Upgrade the database.
Oracle GoldenGate: user Create a replica of the on-premise Oracle Database and deliver it to the cloud. An Oracle GoldenGate user must be on the source database to capture transactions.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management: OCI_Administrator Control policies and who has access to your region's cloud resources. You can control what type of access a group of users have and to which specific resources.

See Learn how to get Oracle Cloud services for Oracle Solutions to get the cloud services you need.