Upgrade from 9.2.0.7 to 9.2.0.8

[Rob van Buiten]

Hi,

Can someone give me some more details about the (bottom)text from Court Campbell ?

Gives it real problems when upgrading? What kind of problems?

Thanks,
Ron

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Oh my. Rob, if you can... stay on 9.2.0.7. Or move to 10g. I have heard it is not worth it. More pain than pleasure. Not unless your application is forcing you to move to it.
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[Yogeeraj_1]

hi Ron,

i think that he is referring to the pain you have each time you apply a patch. (downtimes, need for backup prior to application of the patch, getting the patch) Such minor patch upgrade is worth the effort unless "your application is forcing you to move to it".

The right upgrade would be to go straight to 10.2.3

more precisely:
Patchset: 5337014
Description: 10.2.0.3 PATCH SET FOR ORACLE DATABASE SERVER
Product: Oracle Database Family
Release: 10.2.0.3

Note that you may encounter other issues after installing 9.2.0.8. Upgrade to the latest version ensure that you get better support from Oracle in some way or another. And most important is that the latest version would include all the bug fixes. Each patch update corrects *all* the previous known bugs!

hope this clarifies some of you doubts.

of course, we'll await the reply from Court!

kind regards
yogeeraj

[Ben Dehner]

In my experience, applying every incremental Oracle patchset may be not worth the effort, unless you are hitting a known bug. We have one system running 15 database, and has replication with a second system with another 8 databases, so its just a messy process to apply the patch.

That being said, I have never had a problem applying any Oracle patch set either. We went from 9.2.0.6 to 9.2.0.8 without any issues. We did have one application that specifically *must* run on Oracle 9.2.0.6, so I had to create a seperate ORACLE_HOME for that. You might want to check your application vendors support matrix.

And, while you might or might not want every Oracle patch set, you probably don't want to be too far behind either. Occaisionally Oracle comes up with minor feature enhancements and compatibility issues that require more recent versions. One that just hit us is that Dataguard between PA-RISC and Itanium is only supported with 9.2.0.8.

As for 10g, I have some questions about that. I have heard that there are still some stability issues with 10.2.0.3. There was a posting on Oracle metalink forums from a Solaris admin running 9i RAC, and he claims they can't even *install* 10g without risking crashing the cluster. Anyone remember "9i Unbreakable"? They still have problems one major revsion, 8 patchsets, and a bucket of CPU's later. I don't think they really had the automatic workarea management features really working until around 9.2.0.4 or 9.2.0.5. With the slew of new features in 10g, I don't see it as any different, with only 2 patchsets out.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

There are problems with every major Oracle release and applying patches is a PITA. The methodology often changes and sometimes major patch sets for HP-UX are delivered with install scripts tested only with Solaris. Thats happened to me a few times.

That being said there are benefits to Oracle 10.2.x databases in terms of stability, features and reliability. If the application supports it.

SEP