I am excited to share that Oracle Autonomous Database now supports scheduling an in-place upgrade from database version 19c to 23ai. This capability, as with most things Autonomous, makes it incredibly simple to upgrade your database in just a few clicks, and take advantage of Oracle’s 23ai database features, including those in AI, developer productivity, performance, and many more.
You have two options when scheduling an in-place upgrade for your flexibility:
- Earliest Available Schedule
Selecting this option provides the earliest schedule available by the system — The time of your upgrade will be scheduled for will be displayed on your database console when submitting the request. Using this option has no additional charges to upgrade!
2. Future Scheduled Upgrade
Alternatively, you may choose a specific date and time within the next 30 days. Since this reserves upgrade resources longer for a later date, there will be additional charges — you can read more about that in our billing documentation here.
When your selected time arrives, your 19c database will undergo a brief period of downtime (up to 15 minutes) while Oracle simply swaps in an upgraded 23ai database along with any connected resources such as standbys and refreshable clones.
To ensure a seamless in-place upgrade, the upgrade preserves all your critical identifiers and configurations, such as the database OCID, wallets and database tool URLs. This means your applications can continue to run seamlessly with no configuration changes required post-upgrade.
A last thing I’d like to recommend to make your organization’s upgrade process even more seamless: Before submitting your in-place upgrade on your critical production databases, if you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to consider if you need application continuity and test your applications with a 23ai clone or refreshable clone of your source database. This eliminates any unforeseen issues you may encounter in your application. As you’d expect with any database upgrade it is one-way street and we’ve put enough guardrails in-place to reattach your existing 19c database in case of any rare upgrade failure.
Like other cloud console operations, every scheduled upgrade is trackable through work requests for you to monitor progress.
Next Steps
While there is no immediate mandate to move to 23ai you may want to take advantage of the new capabilities it provides. You can upgrade when the timing is right for your organization and workload. For more details about this feature check out the Scheduled Upgrade to 23ai documentation.
With scheduled upgrades, you get control over upgrade planning with full automation and continuity — making it easier than ever to unlock the new capabilities of Oracle Database 23ai on Autonomous Database!
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