Upgrading From Oracle 7 to Oracle 8i

[NJSteve]

I'm about to purchase the personal edition of Oracle 8i, and will be upgrading from the personal edition of Oracle 7. Can someone please give me some tips on how to make this upgrade go smoothly?

For example, would it be easier to just uninstall version 7 before installing version 8i? Or is there some other procedure for upgrade/install that is more effective?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Regards
Steve

 

[kindus]

I think unintalling oracle 7 is not good idea unless space is a major problem. I think you should be doing something like this
1) take complete back up of your database, still better if you can test your backup copy.
2) install 8i in a new home directory
3) Follow upgrade procedure as recommended by oracle manual.

Note: Read the upgrade procedure in detail before attempting the upgrade and prepare activity plan for upgrade so that you exactly know what you are doing. And log everything.

 

[Strife]

yeap that sounds about right and you should consider using export/import to migrate your db.. only look at the migration utility if you don't have enough space for export/import.

 

[karluk]

I also vote for using export/import to migrate. There was a documented bug in Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition that sometimes caused a database to become unusable after the upgrade. I don't know if it affects Oracle 8i personal edition also, but I think it's probably safer to avoid the migration utility completely..

 

[raygg]

You must use the O7 export pgm to export from the oracle 7 db, and the o8i imp.exe to import to the o8i db. You cannot use o8i exp from o7, or o7 imp into o8i db. Never have two different db versions active on the same machine when doing a full db import.

Shut down o7 when doing the full db import into o8i if both db versions will be present on the same machine concurrently. Use a par file and create a log both on import and output. Do not use the compress option if you have BLOBs.

Import into o8i with rows=n to create all your db objects and no data input. This way you can establish the new table and tablespace structures first and then input the data in a second import.

At this point you can review all your tables and tablespaces to see if you want to resize them. You will be importing the tables with an initial size of the full table, and if you had 50% increases on extents, you may want to resize the NEXT pct increase sizes. You may also want to reallocate some of the large tables or the indexes to their own tablespaces.

Use TOAD (free downloadable at from

http://www.quest.com)

to easily copy, modify and paste scripts of your tables to recreate them resized.

 

[NJSteve]

Thanks everyone for all your help!!

Steve