Database Upgrade Using Transportable Tablespaces: Oracle Database 11g Release 1

Efficient and reliable methods of performing database maintenance - such as upgrading a database - have existed for many Oracle software versions. However, as maintenance windows continue to shrink and database sizes continue to grow, the importance placed on the time required to upgrade a database to a new version has grown considerably. The Transportable TableSpaces (TTS) feature, introduced in Oracle8i, was originally released as a method to move a subset of one database into another, such as plugging parts of an OLTP database into a data warehouse. However, TTS may reduce database upgrade time by moving all user tablespaces from a database running an earlier software release to an empty target database running a current software release.