Database Rolling Upgrades Made Easy by Using a Data Guard Physical Standby Database

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) is the Oracle best practices blueprint for implementing Oracle high availability technologies. Starting with Oracle Database 11g release 1, the MAA recommended best practice for performing rolling database upgrades is to use the transient logical standby database feature available with Oracle Data Guard. This MAA best practice paper describes a Bourne shell script developed by Oracle to automate database rolling upgrades to new Oracle patch sets or full database releases beginning with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 and higher. The database rolling upgrade is performed using an existing Data Guard physical standby database and the transient logical standby rolling upgrade process.