Oracle upgrades require careful planning

By Mark Brunelli, News Editor 31 May 2007 | SearchOracle.com

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SearchOracle.com recently surveyed 683 IT professionals who have a say in the IT decision making process at Oracle shops in a wide variety of industries and found that about half plan to upgrade either their Oracle Database or business applications within the next year. Of that group, the vast majority say they're planning to upgrade from Oracle Database 9i to Oracle Database 10g, the latest version of Oracle's flagship database management system (DBMS).

Meanwhile, a significant portion of respondents indicated an interest in upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12; but according to IT industry analysts, most companies will wait until 2009 or 2010 to upgrade their Oracle business applications.

Finally, a whopping 40% of respondents said that one of the biggest challenges they face in their professional lives is dealing with upgrades and patches.

An unsatisfying upgrade

Database administrators (DBAs) say that upgrades can be a major pain. It's a process that involves a ton of planning, testing and patience, and though many upgrades go smoothly, they sometimes generate disappointing results.

That's what happened in the case of Alex Katykhin, an Oracle DBA based in Ukraine who works for Luxoft, a Russian IT outsourcing firm. Through Luxoft, Katykhin is currently doing DBA work for Deutsche Bank, and he recently completed a migration from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g.

Katykhin is, to say the least, dissatisfied with Oracle 10g so far.

For one thing, he doesn't like the differences between Oracle 9i Cost-Based Optimizer (CBO) and Oracle 10g CBO, an Oracle tool for streamlining SQL execution. As a result of those differences, he has personally had to resolve application problems related to faulty results and suddenly changed execution plans for specific queries.

"The biggest challenge is to make [everything work] after migration," Katykhin said.

Moreover, he says, Database 10g is incredibly buggy -- a problem he attributes to the growing complexity of Oracle's flagship.

"[I think] it is tough to properly test all the code on all stages of development," Katykhin said, "and as a result we have non-tested or not properly tested code, and Oracle makes us, I mean customers, its beta-testers."

Upgrading Oracle business applications: Challenges and tips

More on Oracle upgrades: DBAs look (far) ahead to Database 10g Release 2 upgrades Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g gets an upgrade

One of the biggest challenges of conducting an Oracle business application upgrade is dealing with customizations, according to analysts. Another big challenge is handling the testing and certification process.

Experts say it's important to keep close track of application customizations, because failure to do so could mean a bumpy upgrade.

"[Companies] have got to redo their interfaces right," said Ray Wang, a business applications analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. "Or, in some cases, Oracle may have released features that now exist that didn't exist before, so now they've got to pull [customizations] back in."

When it comes to the testing and certification piece, Wang said, companies should do their best to make use of automated testing tools -- some of which may not have existed during the last ERP upgrade cycle about eight years ago.

"Make sure that the testing strategies are sound," Wang said. "Hopefully, this time around [companies] put in automated testing tools so that they're not doing manual testing on things that should be automated to begin with."

Oracle Database upgrades: More tips

Most Oracle Database users are slow to conduct upgrades -- just do the math. Database 10g is more than three years old, and according to analysts, most companies have only just begun to implement migration plans.

Many companies simply don't want to migrate until they absolutely need to -- and when they do, it's either because they're facing an end of support or because a critical application requires it, according to Noel Yuhanna, a database analyst who also works for Forrester.

The reason, Yuhanna said, is that most companies don't see a need to risk database downtime when everything their business needs is working fine. But that "don't fix it if it ain't broken" mentality may be causing many companies to miss out on the business benefits of newer, state-of-the-art features, he said.

"The new versions, like version 10 and [the upcoming] version 11, are going to certainly improve in automation, in security, in availability and performance," Yuhanna explained. "You've got to look at all those factors."

What's worse, he said, is that some companies actually do go through the upgrade process and still fail to take advantage of new features.

"Every organization should look at what's new in the new release," Yuhanna said. "If you upgrade, you really need to look at some of the new features like XML, unstructured data management and some of the upgrades for performance and tuning automation. Those really not only lower the cost of the administration of databases, but they also make [DBAs] much more productive."

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