Autoupgrade.jar - Skip Fixups Step-by-Step

Autoupgrade will be more and more important to upgrade Oracle databases to the newer releases (18c, 19c, 20c). Mike Dietrich e.g. has told at the DOAG conference 2019, that autoupgrade will be the future of Oracle Exadata database upgrades also.

The autoupgrade tool is a very quick evolving tool and it becomes more stable and more helpful with every new release (nearly every quarter, sometimes every 3 or 4 weeks, you can download a new version from support.oracle.com).

But there are still things, you should know and which can be misunderstood at the documentation, if you start first with the autoupgrade tool. And then you may don't get the result(s) you are expecting.

One of the things I write today about is how you can skip automatically running fixups.This is e.g. useful if you want to prepare the database with the pre-upgrade part and run the autoupgrade.jar later on at a specific time (e.g. at the weekend or late at the evening) and not in dialog mode.This means, you spent less time at the "upgrade" phase itself (e.g. part of the normal prefixups is gathering statistics).
It is also helpful if you run autoupgrade.jar with "deploy" or "upgrade" mode, because BOTH modes automatically run POST fixups (and you may want to skip one or more and do them (later) manually).

Like everytime, first step is to download the latest autoupgrade.jar from MyOracleSupport!

Then, you check the java environment and create your own configuration file. (A small how to (see preparation at https://a-different-view-by-js.blogspot.com/2019/12/everything-goes-auto-1.html) can be found within my slide deck from DOAG 2019 "Alles wird Auto": https://a-different-view-by-js.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html or at Mikes Blog https://mikedietrichde.com/2019/06/13/create-and-adjust-the-config-file-for-autoupgrade-19c/).

I typically use "create_sample_file config" and change that to fit my needs.

After everything is specified in the config file, the autoupgrade.jar is started in analyze mode.

 After some minutes the job has finished. Now it is essential to note down the job number, because you will need it later on in your configuration file. 

 

At the specified log path, you have a subfolder <job-number>/prechecks with a couple of files.

First is, check carefully ALL the issues at the preupgrade-HTML report, because you want to find the ones you don't want the autoupgrade.jar let fix "automatically" (in pre or post phase) while running later on. 

Then, you need to edit the fixup file in the same directory. It's the <database>_checklist.cfg file. 

E.g. if you want to skip the "DICTIONARY_STATS" fixup, you have to change the part at [runfix] from YES (default, as you can see in the picture) to NO and save your file.

Now have a look at the documentation for overriding the default fixups. The documentation clearly states "By default, AutoUpgrade uses the most recent generated file." So this means, if you run the autoupgrade tool later on with the "deploy" mode, the new job creates a new config file and does not recognize yours automatically!

If you use the autoupgrade mode "upgrade" then the prefixup phase is completely skipped, so also the fixups you want to get done will not run.

You have to create a new entry inside of your autoupgrade-configuration.
The parameter is called "checklist" and there you can specify the checklist configuration with the modified prefixup steps.
I like to copy/paste that from another default configuration file I do have, so I only need to uncomment the last line and put the right directory/filename into the configuration.

So the configuration for checklist in my file after the change is:

upg1.checklist=c:\oracle\autoupgrade\logs\ECKES\ECKES\100\prechecks\eckes_checklist.cfg

I typically fix also some other things manually, so I let run the analyze phase more than once and skip all the manually fixed things in the eckes_checklist.cfg of my FIRST job. This makes it easier to handle and I don't need to remember which is the fixup skip configuration file I have specified in my autoupgrade configuration. 

Last step is to run the autoupgrade again in "deploy" mode. It will take the checklist configuration file specified in your config instead of a new one, makes the fixups in there, skips the one with "NO" and proceeds with the upgrade, makes the post fixups which are not set to "NO" and finishes the upgrade.

Isn't that easy in comparison with all the manual things you had to do before when upgrading your database?