Oracle Database Architecture Virtual Session

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Database Upgrade Assistant - Unexpected error occured

Yesterday I was asked to do a test upgrade from Oracle database version 11.2.0.3 to 11.2.0.4 on one of our databases. "Ok" I said, that will be easy.

Our development environment consists of two servers with grid infrastructure. Two databases are in RAC and rest are single instance databases. I wanted to pass whole grid thing and just upgrade one single database for test.

So I downloaded Oracle software and PSU from Oracle Support. Installed it all in separate ORACLE_HOME and fired dbua ...

I really love this kind of errors. I checked the trace.log file to found nothing of use there. Usual lifesaver Mr. Google did provide some help thou. I found one guy with, what seemed to be, similar problem in thread https://community.oracle.com/thread/2571929. Unfortunately solution suggested was as follows:

Oracle Support said to perform the upgrade manually.  DBUA is confused because we have grid infrastructure installed on the node to be upgraded, but the DB to be upgraded on the node is non-rac.

How persuade dbua that there is no grid infrastructure? Luckily for me in desperate move I looked in trace.log again and found this:

[main] [ 2015-03-11 21:17:17.798 CET ] [UnixSystem.isCRSConfigured:2597] configFile=/var/opt/oracle/ocr.loc
[main] [ 2015-03-11 21:17:17.799 CET ] [Utils.getPropertyValue:302] propName=ocrconfig_loc propValue=+OCR
[main] [ 2015-03-11 21:17:17.799 CET ] [UnixSystem.isCRSConfigured:2604] ocrconfig_loc=+OCR
[main] [ 2015-03-11 21:17:17.800 CET ] [Utils.getPropertyValue:302] propName=local_only propValue=false

The solution was to edit /var/opt/oracle/ocr.loc file and change parameter local_only=false to true. Restart dbua and start database upgrade and then change parameter local_only to false again.

Next time, I'll read log file more carefully ....