oracleoracle-11g-r2upgrade
I'm planning to upgrade 3 instances of Oracle (all same Oracle Home) from 11.2.0.3 to 11.2.0.4. I'm going through the installer and I get to the question about Upgrade or install just the database software. I only want to upgrade one instance initially and leave the others running on 11.2.0.3 in parallel. My question is, what's the difference between:
Install database software only
Upgrade an existing database
I really don't want to touch the other SIDs on there.
Just guesswork, but do you select "Upgrade an existing database" early on:
and "advanced install" later on:
The docs do look as if they are referring to the 10g installer.
No, you don't have to reinstall the Oracle software. According to the section "Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1) New Features" in the Database Installation Guide 11g Release 2:
Oracle Universal Installer no longer provides the custom installation option of individual components. Use the
chopttool, a command-line utility that is located in theORACLE_HOME/bindirectory, to configure the database options.
For example, to enable Oracle Real Application Testing, you would first shut down your database, and then issue chopt as follows:
chopt enable rat
For more information on how to enable and disable other database options with chopt, consult "Enabling and Disabling Database Options" section in the Database Installation Guide 11g Release 2.
Best Answer
Choose
Install database software only, then later you can upgrade your databases one by one with DBUA (Database Upgrade Assistant) from the new Oracle Home, or by performing a manual upgrade.