We performed 2 big upgrades to our production Blackboard environment last week. We had been running 7.0 for almost 2 years, but it was time to upgrade to 7.3. The upgrade path was pretty straightforward except for the use of hot fixes in place of the base application pack.

While working in a development environment I came across the need to setup a clustered oracle home (Db_2) on a box with an existing single instance (Db_1). After the cluster ready services (crs) completed and I ran through the db setup I went to run netca to setup the clustered listeners. Unfortunately, the creation of the listener failed with an odd CRS error message.

I ran into a problem while attempting to apply the April 2008 Critical Patch Update. We have a 4 node RAC cluster running 10g R1. I dropped the first node out of the cluster by shutting down the instance on the first node and stopping the node apps using srvctl. The OPatch utility was patched to the requird 1.0.0.0.57 and added to the path.

In the instructions for Oracles January Critical Update database administrators might be surprised to find that downtime is required for their enviornment.

Recently I was working on a project that involved scrubbing data from an oracle instance for a development environment. The data needed to remain intact so that foreign key constraints would be observed, but private information needed to be randomized and/or erased to protect users.