Upgrading Grid Infrastructure 11g to 12c

In this post I will be demonstrating the steps to upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) 11g (11.2.0.4) to Grid Infrastructure 12c (12.1.0.2). Since ASM runs from GI home, ASM would be upgraded automatically while the upgrade of GI. First release version of 12c was 12.1.0.1 and for this example, I would be using 12.1.0.2. As we know that

PRCA-1057 Failed to retrieve the password file location used by ASM asm

PRCA-1057 : Failed to retrieve the password file location used by ASM asm PRCR-1097 : Resource attribute not found: PWFILE

After upgrading your grid infrastructure 11g to 12c, you will notice that executing command “srvctl config asm” returns abovementioned error messages.

Upgrading Oracle 11g Database to 12c using DBUA

For manual upgrade guide from 11g to 12c or 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2, click here

Here I would be discussing how to upgrade Oracle 11g (11.2.0.4) database to 12c (12.1.0.2) on the same server. This upgrade process was done on Linux 6 (x86_64). I used DBUA (Database Upgrade Assistant) to perform this upgrade. DBUA

PRCR-1065: Failed to stop resource ora.asm

Error PRCR-1065 and CRS-2529 can be returned while stopping the ASM using srvctl command on Grid Infrastructure 11.2 and above as can be seen in the following.

[grid@salman1 ~]$ srvctl stop asm PRCR-1065 : Failed to stop resource ora.asm

Oracle Database 12c Patch/Upgrade from 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2

For manual upgrade guide from 11g to 12c, click here. Same guide can also be followed to manually upgrade from 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2.
Before going through this upgrade guide, you may be interested to view the guide to patch/upgrade standalone Grid Infrastructure from 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2. 

ORA-38500 While Enabling Real-Time Redo Apply

If you are trying to enable real time redo apply whereby LGWR process of primary database writes directly to the standby redo log file of the standby database, you might face ORA-38500 error message. Following is an example of this error message.

SQL> ALTER DATABASE RECOVER MANAGED STAND

Grid Infrastructure 12c Patch/Upgrade from 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2

In this post, I will be demonstrating the steps to upgrade/patch the Grid Infrastructure (GI) 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2. Since ASM runs from GI home, ASM would be upgraded while upgrade of GI home. As we know that Oracle now provides full installation binaries for patchset releases so the binaries are required to be downloaded from MOS. You would need to download Patch

Error: "Message 279 not found" while starting Listener

One of my customers has Oracle 11.2.0.4 on windows 2008 R2 (x64). After reboot of this database server, listener did not come up automatically and even manually starting the listener was returning following error at the command prompt.

ORA-12514 During Switchover to Standby

Recently I was performing a switchover from primary to standby database using DGMGRL utility (My Dataguard environment utilizes Dataguard broker). I logged into the server which was hosting current standby database and initiated the DGMGRL command line interface. When I issued the switchover statement, DG Broker was able to convert

ORA-12514 During OEM Database Control Configuration for RAC

While configuring OEM Database Control for 2 nodes 11.2.0.3 RAC (On windows), I faced error "ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect descriptor", about which I would be discussing in the following that what was the reason for this error and how I resolved it.