Migrating Oracle

I have just been migrating a couple of databases off of VMS running Oracle version 8 to a brand new Solaris 10.2 environment.

Fortunately both of the Oracle databases were small being less than 100G each, and most of that indexes, so the actual move went really smoothly. In fact the business was very impressed at how little interruption there actually was, seeing as we did it all out of office hours.

What they don't know was, I and another Oracle developer, had already migrated these systems close on ten times already as practise runs. We had been tripped up before, stumbled around all the problems and solved what we hoped was all the performance issues. What processes could be scripted, had been, what could be tested beforehand, had been. What we expected, we got.

The actual go-live migration was anti climatic in the extreme. Merely a matter of watching the process scripts run, ticking off checkpoints and checking logfiles. All the hard work and mistakes had been done in the practise runs. We had removed most of the risk to routine and what risk remained we managed.

From the practise runs we were able to gather vital information.
Firstly :- would it all work.
Secondly :- could we do it in a reasonable time.
Thirdly :- was it justified.

We were able to answer those questions and go to the business with our times and schedule for migration and happily it all went to plan and we were up and running an hour before we said we would be.

We had allowed ourselves a two hour window of extra time in case things went terribly wrong and I am happy to say that we spent most of one of our hours of extra time ensuring that datafiles were in the correct place, logfiles were generated in the correct place, we could flashback, and most importantly getting a baseline RMAN backup.

If things had gone wrong we wouldn't have heard the end of it. As it is, our manager thanked us for a job well done and then went to inform the rest of the business who hadn't even noticed.

Ah, the joys of a career in IT. If it goes wrong - everyone knows, if it goes right - no-one cares.