Tag: upgrades

MySQL Upgrades

I read Wim Coekaerts post about the MySQL 5.6.20-4 this morning. I logged on to my server and did the following command as root.

# yum update -y

That’ll be the upgrade done then… 🙂

If you are using MySQL on Linux you can use the MySQL Repository for your distribution, rather than using the bundled MySQL version, to make sure you stay up to date with the latest and greatest. As long as you stay within a point release (5.6, 5.7 etc.) of the latest version, upgrades should really be as simple as a “yum update”.

I’ve started the ball rolling for the upgrades to the MySQL servers at work. That will take a bit longer because of the required testing. 🙂

Now I know that Oracle is a very different beast to MySQL or SQL Server, but the patches for MySQL and SQL Server are so much easier that patching Oracle, it’s not surprising people gravitate to them. I’m sure the pluggable database stuff in 12c is going to simplify things somewhat, but it’s still not going to be anywhere near as simple as this stuff.

Cheers

Tim…

Upgrades to 11g are finally complete

Just a little slice of reality to cut through all the 12c stuff that is floating around at the moment. I’ve just moved the last of our databases to 11g. Yay! As well as upgrading, we’ve been culling or consolidating old and unused stuff, which has drastically reduced and simplified our Oracle database landscape.

We currently have four projects running databases on HP-UX on Itanium (spit), one project on Solaris and the rest on Oracle Linux under VMware. If I had my way we would kick out HP-UX and Solaris and do everything on Oracle Linux.

We’ve still got one project on 11gR1, but that is being held back intentionally because of some issues with the vendor of the application that runs against it. Hopefully that will soon be on 11gR2 also.

So about 7 years after the release of 11gR1 and 5 years after the release of 11gR2 we have finally managed to get there. Judging by the conversations I’ve had over the last year, I would say we are ahead of the curve. There are still plenty of people out there with old versions lurking around for a variety of reasons…

With this in mind, what do you think our timescales are for a move to 12c? 🙂 Like many people, I don’t think it will even be considered until 12cR2 is released and even then it won’t happen over night.

Even so, I still believe it is important that people get their heads around what 12c has to offer. Of all the releases in my time working with Oracle products, I think 12c is the one that is really going to mess with people’s heads. If people don’t spend a significant time getting to know this stuff they are going to make really bad decisions and totally stuff up their installations!

Cheers

Tim…