I've heard anecdotal reports suggesting that some customers hold off on upgrading to a given E-Business Suite release until we've done so ourselves here at Oracle. Oracle went live on R12.0.3 in January 2008, and a reader reminded me that I haven't highlighted this adequately. Here's a critical presentation from Eugene Weinstein and Sharon Leong at OAUG Collaborate 2008 (Denver) that I've been remiss in profiling:
Eugene and Sharon cover a lot of ground in this technically-oriented presentation, including:
- A primer on the R12 file system
- Supported upgrade paths from earlier Apps releases (11.5.x, 11.0)
- A detailed step-by-step flowchart of the upgrade process
- Applications DBA (AD) improvements relating to the upgrade process
- Performance improvements relating to the upgrade
- Best practices for:
- Reducing downtime
- Performing pre-upgrade, upgrade, and post-upgrade steps
The Inside Track
Perhaps most significantly, Eugene and Sharon review Oracle's own Global Single Instance (GSI) experiences in upgrading to Release 12. This discussion includes:
- An overview of Oracle's production R12 architecture
- A summary of Oracle's preupgrade statistics (12 Terabytes, 25.8 billion rows of data, and more)
- EBS applications in use at Oracle
- Project planning
- Pre-upgrade planning, the actual upgrade itself, datafile management, and post-upgrade planning
- Keys to success in Oracle's own upgrade
Eugene and Sharon make a point of emphasizing that their experiences are specific to Oracle's internal implementation and may not apply to all upgrades. As you'd expect, our internal Applications IT organization has direct access to everyone in Oracle Development. Their notes represent an insider's glimpse into how an organization with access to the most-skilled EBS talent on the planet performed this upgrade. This is mandatory reading for all Apps architects and DBAs interested in Release 12.
If you have questions about Oracle's own upgrade, feel free to post them here.
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Comments (16)
thank you steven,
its a very informative post.
fadi
Posted by fadi hasweh | July 16, 2008 12:41 AM
Posted on July 16, 2008 00:41
thanks for the initiative
really.. its a timely information to convince clients who are still insisting to their upgrade to 11.5.10.2 and restricting themselves to not to go for R12, which is the real world's most effective ERP.
expecting these kind of articles/initiatives in the coming days to so that most clients can understand about the competative features of R12 rather than looking about the complexity.
efforts are heartly appriciated.
kumar sana
Posted by kumar sana | July 16, 2008 7:31 PM
Posted on July 16, 2008 19:31
Kumar,
Glad to hear that you found this useful. We're eager to keep track of everyone's progress with R12, so feel free to drop me a line with details if you've been involved with an upgrade.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | July 17, 2008 8:25 AM
Posted on July 17, 2008 08:25
Useful summary. We are on our 3rd iteration of testing the upgrade. We hit this time the magical point of *0* invalid objects for the first time ever.
We went from 11.5.10 CU2 (on 10.2.0.3 db) to R12. The database tier side has been the most problematic in this respect. Although you can use the existing db tier files, you need the jre from the adutils and clone directories (as its 1.5). We found just copying them over was sufficient.
What we are struggling with now is Configuration Manager (OCM). Its fine on the apps tier but the old 11i db tier does not come with it. Now we are at the dilema, do we apply the 11i OCM patch or copy over the R12 db tier ccr_stage and use that? The problem being that the R12 OCM documentation says you can only use the Rapid Install provided version and not the patch version but the 11i documentation says download the patch and apply...
Posted by Richard Halford | July 22, 2008 8:01 AM
Posted on July 22, 2008 08:01
Richard,
Thanks for the additional background about your R12 upgrade. Congratulations on hitting the "Zero Milestone"!
Earlier versions of OCM didn't support some specific E-Business Suite database configurations, hence the need to apply a "special" OCM version to your environments.
This has changed with the most recent OCM release. The OCM team has built in new support for E-Business Suite environments natively into the tool. I am trying to verify the specific OCM version number for this. I'll post an update either here in this comment thread or as a separate article as soon as I have more details on this.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | July 22, 2008 10:41 AM
Posted on July 22, 2008 10:41
Richard,
I've confirmed that you can apply the "native" version of OCM 10.2.7 or higher to your database ORACLE_HOME. As of that OCM release, no special version is required for the E-Business Suite's database ORACLE_HOME.
I'm still trying to hunt down the actual documentation where this is stated. In the interim, if you have any problems with this installation, please feel free to log a formal Service Request and send me the details. I'll have one of our developers assist Support, as needed.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | July 23, 2008 11:26 AM
Posted on July 23, 2008 11:26
Hi,
Thanks for the update. As a test I got our dba to copy the rapid install ccr_stage directory over then run autoconfig. As if by magic it just worked, which we were pleased by and now have a few instances registered.
I'll be very interested when the official documenation it out to support using the "vanilla" OCM version (currently the official docmentation states don't download) as this will be the way we will go in future I expect.
Posted by Richard Halford | July 25, 2008 1:08 AM
Posted on July 25, 2008 01:08
Hi, Richard,
Glad to hear that worked for you; I'll pass on the good news to my developers. We're about to publish a new Note with more details about using OCM in E-Business Suite environments. Stay tuned -- I'll be putting the word out on this soon.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | July 25, 2008 2:26 PM
Posted on July 25, 2008 14:26
Hi,
In the presentation there's an sheet giving "Data Statistics before R12 Upgrade" is there a way to find the figures after the upgrade ?.
Also I'm wondering if I could find somewhere the statistics about the time of different steps of the upgrade.
Thanks
Maurice.
Posted by maurice weiss | August 12, 2008 1:17 AM
Posted on August 12, 2008 01:17
Can anybody list me the tables..or in general all the objects that get affected when i do a upgrade from Oracle 11.5.9 to R12.
To put it simple please tell me what are the objects that is affected/impacted during a 11.5.9 to R12 upgrade?
Posted by Rakesh kumar | August 12, 2008 11:42 AM
Posted on August 12, 2008 11:42
Hi, Maurice,
I've passed your question on to Eugene Weinstein. I'll provide an update here once I hear back from him.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | August 12, 2008 12:58 PM
Posted on August 12, 2008 12:58
Hi, Steve,
Did Oracle perform any feasibility study that may be public record for their upgrade from 11i to 12R?
Thanks!
Kem Haskett
Posted by Kem Haskett | September 14, 2008 10:59 AM
Posted on September 14, 2008 10:59
Hi, Kem,
I'm not aware of any feasibility study having been performed prior to the upgrade. As far as I'm aware, they just followed the generic R12 upgrade guide and did a trial upgrade to identify any potential issues.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | September 16, 2008 10:07 AM
Posted on September 16, 2008 10:07
Hi Steven,
I'm interested in this case study, as we will upgrade from 11i to 12 in 2009Q1, could you please send me the complete presentation.
Many thanks.
Best regards,
Mohamed Ali.
Posted by Mohamed Ali | September 22, 2008 3:07 AM
Posted on September 22, 2008 03:07
"Hi, Maurice,
I've passed your question on to Eugene Weinstein. I'll provide an update here once I hear back from him.
Regards,
Steven"
That was your reply on the 12th of August, I haven't seen anything so far... did I miss something ?
Thanks.
Maurice.
Posted by maurice weiss | September 23, 2008 12:38 AM
Posted on September 23, 2008 00:38
Hi, Maurice,
No, you haven't missed anything. I'm afraid that our internal Apps IT team didn't have any statistics collected in any document that could be shared externally.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | September 30, 2008 2:32 PM
Posted on September 30, 2008 14:32