Database migration across platforms of different “endian” (byte ordering) formats using the Transportable Tablespaces (TTS) process is now certified for Oracle E-Business Suite Release R12 (12.0.4 and higher, 12.1.1 and higher) with Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Small endian to big endian platform mappings

Obtaining the Required EBS Patch

This migration process requires a patch delivered by the E-Business Suite Platform Engineering team that is ‘Controlled’, i.e. it requires a password obtainable from Development through Oracle Support. We released the required patch in this manner to potentially monitor customer issues (due to the nature of this technology), to gauge suitability and to monitor uptake. Customers may be required to fill out a questionnaire as part of an evaluation and approval process.

Does it meet your requirements?

Note that for migration across platforms of the same “endian” format, users are advised to use the Transportable Database (TDB) migration process instead for large databases. The “endian-ness” target platforms can be verified by querying the view V$DB_TRANSPORTABLE_PLATFORM using sqlplus (connected as sysdba) on the source platform:

SQL> select platform_name from v$db_transportable_platform;
If the intended target platform does not appear in the output, it means that it is of a different endian format from the source and Transportable Tablespaces (for large databases) or export/import should be used for database migration. The use of Transportable Tablespaces can greatly speed up the migration of the data portion of the database – it does not affect metadata which must still be migrated using export/import. We recommend that users initially perform a test migration with export/import on their database with the ‘metrics=y’ parameter to find out the relative size of data vs metadata in their database and to have a basis to compare any gains in timing. Generally speaking, the larger the relative size of data (as compared to metadata), the more likely it would be that XTTS is suitable to reduce downtime. References

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