RMAN or full backup to disk between 9i and 10g ?????

[Henrique Silva_3]

Hi everyone.

I have an issue that I am trying to deal with related to RMAN and upgrading the 9i db into 10g without having any downtime on the 9i box.

Scenario : 9i is legacy db, 2.3 TB on PA-RISC in Datacenter in Europe, backup is BCP, and I am not sure if it is through RMAN or not or via scripts written by DBA.
New db is 10g in Itanium on data center is US, RMAN backups setup on the box.

Since I can not install 9i bits on the US data center, to setup data guard, ( DO NOT ASK ME WHY :-) ), and I do not want to set up streams ( no knowledge of the app data model, schema, no time, etc ), and we are doing tons of legacy to new data center migrations, I am trying to udnerstand how we can do this without much down time to the legacy environment.

Here is what I came up with, but need to get your opinion on it.

DO a full online backup of the db to bcp, break the mirror, and backup the data files, plus the redo log files, and other database configuration files to tape. Send these to US, and restore the files on the 10g box.

Mount the 9i files on the 10g binaries and do the upgrade. Once the DB is up and running in 10g, the application team has a process to send the delta from the legacy box over to the 10g box ( a poor's man streams, but te app team is responsible for it ).

Once we catch up, we shutdown the legacy, switch the data feeds to the new db, and users, and voila, downtime is minimum.

Now, the question that I have is can RMAN do that for me between versions ? I know I can use RMAN for setting up another instance for Data Guard purposes, but DG only works if they are the db binaries are at the same version. If I can not use RMAN, than, I will need to do the online backups via scripts, and restore that, but I am not sure if the 10g db will recover or roll back transactions once I start the upgrade process.

Any help here will be appreciated.

Cheers,

Henrique

[Henrique Silva_3]

One more thing, we can not upgrade the legacy to 10g either.

Henrique

[Jov]

Check your other thread, assuming you're addressing the same problem.


Jov

[Ben Dehner]

Not knowing your environment, my first thought is to start sending out your resume.

There are two seperate operations being performed here. 1) migrating to a new system, and 2) upgrading from 9i to 10g. DataGuard is the Oracle product designed to do operation (1), and upgrade assistant is the product designed to do (2). Operating under the apparently arbitrary constraint of not using either of these products and trying to do something with rman, import, streams, datapump, or whatever is opening yourself up for a world of problems.

To answer your question, you can restore the 9i database using the 10g rman executables, although this is not recommended. See Metalink article #369644.1. The following paragraph is taken directly from this article:

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It is possible to use the 10.2 RMAN executable to restore a 9.2 database. RMAN is configured so that a higher release is able to restore a lower release, but it is strongly suggested you use only the same version. The greatest potential for problems is during the recover and open database phases. You should not use RMAN duplicate between two different versions as results are unpredictable. If you will be using the restored 9.2 database against 10.2 binaries, you need to run the upgrade steps to make the restored 9.2 database a 10.2 database.
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The other problem you will have is applying redo against the new database. The RMAN recovery *might* be used to recover the database using any archive logs generated during the backup and transfer process. The above quote infers that this alone may be problematic. But once the 9i to 10g migration is started, the database will be opened, and no further recovery will be possible. At this point, any transactions on the original source database will be lost, unless they can be re-applied at the application level.