Everything goes Auto? First experiences with the Oracle Autoupgrade-Tool - Part 4 - Non-CDB to PDB conversion after upgrade

As this post is a part of a series of posts regarding Autoupgrade-tool, you might want to start with the first (configuration) or the second post (pre-upgrade analysis).

To convert a non-CDB to a PDB automatically after the upgrade, you can set "target_cdb" (first create an empty CDB or use an already existing one) in your configuration file.

While testing that, I was getting an error that the guaranteed restore point couldn't be dropped. But it wasn't existing, as I have set "restoration=no" in my configuration (Slide 42, 43). Well, I opened another SR that this step fails on Windows (on Linux I only had already CDBs, therefore I couldn't test that there). Mike Dietrich than told me that this feature is shown on his blog, but it does not exists in the documentation. As it is not official released yet, it should show the future of the tool.

As Mike is right, this is not a scenario for a SR,  I closed mine immediately (Slide 44), for sure, there is no issue with a non-production-use of the tool. Only 2 or 3 days (!) later (now speaking with the development directly) I got a newer pre-version from Mike personally! So I was able to go forward with my tests.

The autoupgrade.jar tool then stepped over the GRP problem but was running into a plug-in violation (Slides 45/46). The, again, very good logfiles recorded an error, that the description.xml could not be read. The description.xml file did exist, so was it another non-production-use thing?
Development helped me analysing it and so we found out together that the problem seems to be related to the database version 19c (on Windows). If we put the description.xml into ORACLE_HOME/database the file can be found, but not at it's original place (Slide 47).
While the one thing is database bound, the fixes for the GRP will for sure be seen in the December or January release of the tool.


Edit (December, 2nd): What happened after the DOAG conference: With development feedback and some long testing runs over the weekend I have figured out, where the problem starts (it's a Windows/Oracle Database rights issue). I am waiting for the developers assessment on that, maybe I write another, different post, which is only a little bit related to autoupgrade.jar as the problem may hit you at every MS Windows environment.

Edit (May 14th, 2020): The newest version of autoupgrade.jar does now support Non-CDB to PDB conversion officially. I have not tested that yet.

The next post for my DOAG session can be found here.