9.2.0.4 upgrade - new Oracle Home?

I will be upgrading my production database from 9.2.0.1 to 9.2.0.4 Saturday night. I will have plenty of B/Us.

Do you recommend creating a new Oracle home for the 9.2.0.4 binaries or just upgrade the current Oracle home ? I can always reinstall 9.2.0.1 and go back from a cold backup.

Here is my experience - I did not create a new Oracle home for any of these:
1. Development upgraded very easily
2. QA was a nightmare due to a corrupt JVM..
3. Eventually I cloned production into QA and then the upgrade went very smoothly (this gives me big confidence that the prod upgrade will work).

Thanks

I've never created a new home for a patchset which is really not an upgrade, nontheless I always backups the binaries and registry

I ALWAYS install into a new $OH and apply the patches to the new $OH.

Quote:

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Originally posted by marist89
I ALWAYS install into a new $OH and apply the patches to the new $OH.

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why so? do you mean you could end up with an oracle home for 92020, 92030, 92040,92050 etc

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Originally posted by stmontgo
why so? do you mean you could end up with an oracle home for 92020, 92030, 92040,92050 etc

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In theory, sure. However, once I've patched 9.2.0.4 to 9.2.0.5, I un-install 9.2.0.4. While I'm upgrading, I have two $OH, but while everything is on the same version, I have one $OH.

I run a lot of machines with multiple databases. (I know, I know, and TKyte agrees with you. It works for my environment.) If these databases are down for more than about 2 hours on the weekend, all heck breaks loose. I use multiple $OH for a couple reasons:
1. I can install and patch the software during the week. This will cut about 30 minutes off my upgrade time. Also, since I have to install with a GUI, I can't do it remotely over dial-up.
2. When I'm upgrading, I don't have to upgrade every database on the host at the same time. While this may spread my upgrade over several weekends, it still keeps the database down for less than 2 hours.
3. My rollback plan is simple, shutdown the existing database, switch the $OH, startup, rerun the catalog scripts. If something goes wrong in the upgrade, I can still have the DB up in 2 hours.
4. Since all the GUI work is done, I can run the upgrade over dial-up. While this has nothing to do with my 2-hour window, it saves me the 2.5 hours of commuting back and forth to the office for an hour's worth of work.

Quote:

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Originally posted by marist89

My rollback plan is simple, shutdown the existing database, switch the $OH, startup, rerun the catalog scripts. If something goes wrong in the upgrade, I can still have the DB up in 2 hours.

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Interesting...rather than restore from a cold backup