Tiny little important enhancement in Oracle Database 12.1.0.2: The new CONTAINERS clause to access data from different containers within one SQL statement. This may be very helpful, especially in c…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
AIOUG OC Yatra 2025 is over, and I somehow recovered as well. As I wrote here, it was (again) an incredible experience with all those wonderful people (you!!) and those crazy speakers (us!) – and I learned a lot again. Still, I had no clue that Database and Developer evangelist and video wizard Connor McDonald would react to my friendly nagging 🙂 Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash Have you used AutoUpgrade before? If you say “No, not really“, then this video is for you. See how ...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Learning something new every day is the best part of my job. And as you can see and read on the blog, thanks to YOU, I learn a lot. This one I learned from Johannes Ahrends at my workshop for ora2k…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
This time the AutoUpgrade team did magic and included so many great new features and useful enhancements into the new version of AutoUpgrade. So, please note: The August 2025 version of AutoUpgrade (25.4) is available for download. You should refresh your current versions, especially when you use it for patching, and especially if you attempt to do in an RAC (Real Application Clusters) environment. But read more below. Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash How to download it? As usual,...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
I really love our customers. Many people are so super-smart. A few weeks ago I delivered a full-day hands-on workshop for ora2know in Munich and some (positively) crazy people fly in very early morning from the other end of Germany to attend. Others catch a train at night time (which is the bigger adventure in Germany these days). I feel really grateful since this was also a pay-for-it workshop. It was a great day, I’ve had lots of fun – and the attendees hopefully as well. Dagmar sent me...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
I just returned the other day from the most strenuous trips I do once a year: The AIOUG Oracle Community Yatra tour. 6 cities in 9 days. It’s a wild ride with flights and bus transfers in bet…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Time flies so quickly. Soon we’ll get together again in Las Vegas for Oracle Cloud World 2025. This year, it will be in October where hopefully it’s a few degrees colder (or less hot) t…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Those of you who have been to our workshops in the past 3 years know that we promote one feature as the ultimate killer feature for moving to Oracle Database 19c and 23ai: Refreshable Clones. These work not only from PDB to PDB, but magically also with a non-CDB. And our teams works with a good number of customers using exactly this technique to Oracle 23ai. Now, we talked about it. And we blogged about it (see below). But there is a brand-new MOS note out there showcasing an AutoUpgrade migr...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Let’s kick it off. When the ora2know group started at DOAG conference in Nuernberg in November 2024, we committed ourselves to support them. And this is exactly the reason why I am going to i…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
I am jealous, and so happy. There are so happy about the fact that we have such skilled minds in the industry. One of them is Marcus Vinicius, an Oracle ACE Pro from Brazil who lives in Dallas, TX …| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Many of you know it and downloaded it already. But just in case you are not aware yet, let me give you a quick summary since the May 2025 version of AutoUpgrade (25.3) is available for download. Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash How to download it? That’s very simple. You either download it via the well-known MOS Note: 2485457.1 – AutoUpgrade Tool or you fetch it directly from oracle.com with curl, wget or by just clicking on the big buttom. What’s new? Well, 25.3 is a one-fix-only...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Not a big deal – but Samo has brought this to my attention. And the RMAN development and PM team was happy to help and shed some light here. But one after another – what actually is the…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
ORAdiff is an amazing tool I use at least once a day. And if you did the same before applying 19.26.0 or moving from 19.25.0 to 19.27.0, you may have spotted this change as well. There is a DB_LOST…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
One requirement of Transportable Tablespaces (and of course Full Transportable Export/Import as well) is to have identical database character sets AND identical time zone settings. Problem Source d…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
I could have sworn that I had blogged about it. Aleksey had a comment on the blog and I could not find the answer. But I knew that I had discussed this topic with several people in email already. Maybe it has fallen off my long list of future blog posts. No worries, here it is: DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE and the standby database? Photo by 张 嘴 on Unsplash DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE – short recap I have a longer list of DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLEblog posts, and you can easily navigate to them here. In very short, y...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
No worries, I don’t start writing a travel blog. Or, maybe one day I will. But not for now. Daniel and I will be on the road again next week for a full day workshop in Utrecht on May 6 and in Brussels on May 7. Brussels is sold out already, the registration is closed. But in Utrecht we still have a few seats open due to the superb conference auditorium space in the Oracle office. Clearly, Utrecht in Spring is beautiful – and we’ll be there on May 6. And it is very close to Brussels in ...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
I keep saying this – we have the best and most skilled customers. Christian Klose from my Franconian home region contacted me via LinkedIn and asked for some assistance with an SR. I confess, I replied way too late (information overflow). But the finding Christian had is great to know. There are new interesting underscores for more than 255 _FIX_CONTROLs. Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash Why don’t you see them in ORAdiff? As usual, I went to ORAdiff and tried to find out anything about t...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Having good friends in Oracle is key. And honestly one of the best things in my role. Philippe Fierens, product manager for Oracle’s Fleet Patching and Provisioning mailed me yesterday night sharing that there is an interesting change coming with Database Release Update 19.27: Small Pages not allowed for SGA from 19.27 and newer on Exadata. Photo byGeorge Bonev on Unsplash What does this mean? As you can read in MOS Note: 3081878.1 – Starting DBRU 19.27 Small Pages Are Not Allowed for RDB...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Where are they? I saw some so-called “social” media rants this morning already about the missing April 2025 bundles, and people comparing file sizes of opatch wondering what has been fo…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
We work right now with a number of customers going live or being live on Oracle Database 23ai already. And tomorrow will be the release date for the quarterly Release Update, in this case for Oracl…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
I know, not everybody is a huge fan of new features in RUs. But how do find new features in Oracle Release Updates (RUs)? Are the listed anywhere? They are, no worries. At least since Oracle Database 19c. Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash New Features in RUs? I can already sense that some of you will be tempted to comment and tell me that you don’t like any new features in Oracle Database Release Updates, in short: RUs. But on the other hand there is also something good with it. Rather than...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Nicola made a comment the other day informing me that they hit an issue on some of their databases when upgrading. But is there a general issue with ORA-12850 when you run AutoUpgrade? Or is this e…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
London calling! Your chance to attend our first full-day Upgrade 19c and 23ai Workshop in London on April 9, 2025 in a decade. Yes, you read correctly. We’ve run such a workshop the last time in 2014. This was when you used an iPhone 6 at best case. Most importantly, this is an in-person only event. No streaming will be available. Photo by Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash How do you register? Simple. No extra cost. Zero marketing. Just tech!! But be aware that you should free up your seat in cas...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
Uh … this was a long journey. In September 2022 Jannes Arends contacted me showing me his growing SYSTEM tablespace with every patch cycle. And not only for the CDB$ROOT only but in every PDB…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
I’m dealing lately with several migration to Oracle Autonomous Database, mostly to ADB Serverless (called “shared” a while ago, in short: ADB-S). With one of the customers we run SQL Performance Analyzer reports with about 1500 statements. But one topic came up in this ADB Migration: Why does my SPA report has so many errors? Let’s see why that is … Photo by Weichao Deng on Unsplash A little bit of background on SPA The SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) is one of the two pieces of Real...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
It’s time for a new version of AutoUpgrade. The 25.1 version of AutoUpgrade is available for download. And you should refresh your existing versions quickly since we added plenty of new and long awaited features but we of course fixed also known bugs. Photo by John Rodenn Castillo on Unsplash How to download AutoUpgrade 25.1 Not only can you download the newest AutoUpgrade and its previous versions from MOS Note:2485457.1 – Download AutoUpgrade. But for many of you it may be easier to jus...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
I had to shorten the headline a bit. It got very bulky saying at first: Use a Refreshable Clone with AutoUpgrade from non-CDB to PDB but keep your RAC configuration alive. Well, you see, that’s bulky. But it describes the case I would like to briefly show you. Helmut Pfau, a colleague of mine here in Germany asked this the other day, and it took us a bit to get the correct answer to him – I confess, simply because I didn’t know the right AutoUpgrade parameter. Photo by Adrian Infernus o...| Upgrade your Database – NOW!
I love to learn something new every day. And thanks to my Dutch friend, Robert Pastijn, I learned about a limitation of how many objects you can create in an Oracle database. Nothing to worry about…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Quick blog post only since I received this question 3x this week in various ways from customers. Why isn’t the newest JDK in this Oracle Release Update? Let me try to answer and explain it. J…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
I held back this blog post for a longer while. A customer (Thanks Jannes!) reported this to me many months ago but the fix was not as trivial as we thought initially, and there were several unlucky…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Today, Gisela, a former team mate from CSS/ACS Support contacted me regarding an issue seen at a customer. She reported an ORA-39405 with impdp when you have mixed time zone versions. But how can t…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Thanks for using this blog post. It will be your Upgrade / Migration / Patching Guide for OCW23. You will find the slide decks to download, the coming talks, the HOL as well as the survey links and…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
You may have read my blog post from yesterday about the additional second year of Waived Extended Support for Oracle Database 19c. But there are more news such as Restricted Upgrade Support added f…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
Daniel pointed me to Tim Hall’s blog post about deprecated and desupported features in Oracle Database 23c. And his first bullet point mentioned is the DBUA Deprecation and future Desupport i…| Upgrade your Database - NOW!
