Testing an Oracle DB upgrade - Amazon Relational Database Service

Testing an Oracle DB upgrade

Before you upgrade your DB instance to a major version, thoroughly test your database and all applications that access the database for compatibility with the new version. We recommend that you use the following procedure.

To test a major version upgrade

  1. Review the Oracle upgrade documentation for the new version of the database engine to see if there are compatibility issues that might affect your database or applications. For more information, see Database Upgrade Guide in the Oracle documentation.

  2. If your DB instance uses a custom option group, create a new option group compatible with the new version you are upgrading to. For more information, see Option group considerations.

  3. If your DB instance uses a custom parameter group, create a new parameter group compatible with the new version you are upgrading to. For more information, see Parameter group considerations.

  4. Create a DB snapshot of the DB instance to be upgraded. For more information, see Creating a DB snapshot for a Single-AZ DB instance for Amazon RDS.

  5. Restore the DB snapshot to create a new test DB instance. For more information, see Restoring to a DB instance.

  6. Modify this new test DB instance to upgrade it to the new version, by using one of the following methods:

  7. Perform testing:

    • Run as many of your quality assurance tests against the upgraded DB instance as needed to ensure that your database and application work correctly with the new version.

    • Implement any new tests needed to evaluate the impact of any compatibility issues that you identified in step 1.

    • Test all stored procedures, functions, and triggers.

    • Direct test versions of your applications to the upgraded DB instance. Verify that the applications work correctly with the new version.

    • Evaluate the storage used by the upgraded instance to determine if the upgrade requires additional storage. You might need to choose a larger instance class to support the new version in production. For more information, see DB instance classes.

  8. If all tests pass, upgrade your production DB instance. We recommend that you confirm that the DB instance working correctly before allowing write operations to the DB instance.