During the upgrading of an Oracle database from
10g to 10.2.0.4 under Solaris I ran into a number of problems. So this is a log
of what went wrong and how to get around the problems. This log refers to a
single instance non-Rac database environment. All tasks should be performed under
the oracle user except where otherwise stated.
1). You first need to download and unzip the p6810189_10204_Solaris-64.zip to
/tmp for example.
2). Shutdown the database instance and check that all oracle processes have
terminated.
3). Now start the runInstaller in the unzipped tmp directory in Disk1 ie.
/tmp/oracle/Disk1
4). When prompted run the root.sh script as root.
5). Startup the database with sqlplus as sys in upgrade mode "startup upgrade".
6). Execute the upgrade assistant "dbua" and follow the instructions.
Possible problems are:
1). You can get an ORA-01507 during the dbua execution. Under solaris that resulted from a discrepancy between the ORACLE_HOME and the oratab entry. Correcting that was tricky for two reasons. Firstly you need root rights to change the oratab and secondly I found two versions of oratab in /etc and /var/opt/oracle.
2). Because the ORACLE_HOME was not setup correctly I needed to alter the root.sh script. Also the rdbms/install/rootadd.sh and the oraInst.loc in ORACLE_HOME had an incorrect path. Although the paths actually mapped to the same physical directories they used alternate linked paths and where as such not identical this caused the dbua to throw an ORA-01507 saying that the "'Dbua thinks this is a Rerun operation" and the database is not mounted - which was actually all rubbish.
