This note describes the procedure used to perform a minimal downtime platform migration from Windows to Linux as well as a database upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2).
We create a Data Guard physical standby database using the DUPLICATE FROM ACTIVE DATABASE feature, followed by a switchover and then we activate the standby and make it a primary database. Finally we upgrade the database to 12c using the catctl.pl perl utility with the parallel upgrade option.
By using Data Guard and the 12c command line parallel upgrade utility the entire operation has been performed with database outage of less than 30 minutes.
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