Prepare for Oracle Database 23ai

Upgrading a database can be a complex and time-consuming process. It’s important to thoroughly research and plan for the upgrade to ensure a smooth and successful transition. The planning efforts need to include reviewing support notes and alerts, testing the upgrade in multiple lower environments, performing validation tests in UAT/QA/staging environments, and even performance testing with tools like Real Application Testing (RAT) to play the production workload in another environment to validate performance metrics after the upgrade. Customers should follow a systematic approach for database upgrades to ensure successful upgrades.

Oracle Database 23ai has been in production since:

We are all waiting for Oracle Database 23ai to become available for on-premise customers. Customers should only consider upgrading their databases to long-term support releases: Oracle Database 19c or Oracle Database 23ai. These versions are critical as they provide long-term support, and extended support will only be available for these releases. Customers should prioritize upgrading to Oracle Database 23ai in the upcoming year because 23ai is packed with over 300 innovative features focused on AI, development ease, and support for mission-critical data.

Oracle Database 19c will now be supported until December 31, 2029. This ensures customers can benefit from ongoing updates, security patches, and technical assistance for an extended period, providing flexibility in planning their database upgrades and long-term strategies. Extended support for 19c will be provided until December 31, 2032. All EBS customers automatically received free extended support. EULA (End-User License Agreement) customers also receive free extended support. All other customers must purchase extended support for an additional cost. Please check MOS Note 742060.1 for the latest update as Oracle has changed their support dates over the years.

Review the following diagram of all the database release versions and support timelines. The dates shown on this diagram are subject to change as Oracle may postpone their release dates.

Key things to remember with the versions of the Oracle Database:

Innovation Release offers 2 years of Premier Support and no Extended Support.
Long-Term Release offers 5 years of Premier Support and 3 years of Extended Support
Market Driven Support became Upgrade Support. Customers should contact CSS for Upgrade Support.
- Oracle ACS (Advanced Customer Support) has been renamed to CSS (Customer Success Services)

Oracle Database 23ai will receive premier support until the end of December 2031. If we follow the general rule for extended support, Oracle Databases 23ai will have extended support until the end of 2034.

Multi-tenant Adoption

Oracle Database 23ai is the next long-term release of the database. All customers should already be running Oracle Database 19c for their production databases in a multi-tenant architecture. If you are not already running Oracle databases in a containerized environment, you need to adopt pluggable databases as soon as possible. With Oracle Database 21c and 23ai, Oracle only allows pluggable databases; non-containerized databases are no longer supported.

Starting with Oracle Database 19c, customers are allowed to create up to 3 pluggable databases per container database for free without incurring the multi-tenant license cost.

Upgrade Path to Oracle Database 23ai

Here are some caveats that customers need to consider as they prepare for the 23ai upgrade journey. You cannot upgrade from Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.4) or 12c Release 1 to Oracle Database 23ai. You are not even permitted to upgrade from Oracle Database version 12.2 or 18c to 23ai. You must upgrade to either Oracle Database 19c or 21c prior to upgrading to Oracle Database 23ai. A direct upgrade path from the earlier releases is not permitted. We tell all of our customers to upgrade to Oracle Database 19c as the stepping stone if they are on older versions of Oracle and then upgrade to Oracle Database 23ai. The following table depicts the upgrade path to 23ai:

Upgrade Methods

One of the key factors to consider when choosing a method for upgrading your Oracle database is the amount of downtime you can afford. If your application requires high availability and cannot tolerate extended periods of downtime, you may need to choose a method that allows you to perform the upgrade with minimal disruption. Options such as cross-platform upgrades or real-time/rolling upgrades may be more suitable in this case, as they allow you to migrate the data (or database) and perform a switchover to the new database without taking the system offline.

AutoUpgrade has been around for a while. DBUA and the manual DBUpgrade methods will soon be completely deprecated and unsupported. DBAs should (if not already) adopt the AutoUpgrade method for all database upgrades and even for database patches.

We can upgrade from legacy database versions (11.2.0.4, 12.1.0.2, 12.2.0.1, 18c) directly to 23ai using logical replication leveraging tools like SharePlex or GoldenGate. Even better, we can perform near zero-downtime database upgrades with these tools. With careful design, we can even reverse the replication after the database upgrade to replicate data from 23ai back to the legacy database releases including 19c.

The COMPATIBLE Initialization Parameter

Many customers still have their COMPATIBLE parameter set to a value lower than 19.0.0 to avoid potential performance headaches after the upgrade to 19c. As they upgrade to Oracle Database 23ai, customers must advance the COMPATIBLE initialization parameter to 19.0.0 as a minimum. For those who have not advanced the COMPATIBLE parameter to 19.0.0, you will need to perform due diligence to test the applications for performance and stability.

We strongly encourage customers to advance the COMPATIBLE parameter to the latest value and perform a full regression test of all their applications, interfaces, and scheduled jobs. If you are creating a new database on 23ai, you should always accept the default value for the COMPATIBLE parameter.

Pre-upgrade Checks

There are myriads of pre-upgrade validations that need to be performed to ensure a smooth and successful database upgrade. The more we prepare, the more likely it will be correlated to better success. Here are some of the preparations that you can do before database upgrades (and even apply to major patches too):

Always create a Guaranteed Restore Points (GRPs)
Spend a lot of time planning for the upgrade with the application development team
Learn how to force execution plans based on old plans
Execute and review output from the preupgrade.jar file
Record invalid objects
Capture DBMS_JOBs, directories, extproc, and database links
Leverage Real Application Testing suite for performance benchmarking
Create rollback plan
Review database links and passwords
Configure auto-upgrade configuration file
A LOT more

For an extensive list of pre-upgrade tasks and validation steps, please reach out to Charles via email.

Conclusion

With the premier support being offered to the end of December 2029, customers may not have the urgency to upgrade their databases to Oracle Database 23ai. Oracle packed a ton of high availability, performance, analytics, development, artificial intelligence and machine learning new features in 23ai to make the upgrade journey attractive.

Happy Holidays! 🎄

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