Thinking of upgrading Oracle from 7.3.4 to 8i. What are the things to be aware of? Memory, re-licensing, tablespace, etc... Has anybody done this recently?

Any recommendations?

We upgraded over a year ago. You will definitely have re-evaluate your memory needs because Oracle8i does use more. You won't need more space for your tablespaces except for the SYSTEM tablespace, but the upgrade instructions will give you some guidance there. If you are current with your Oracle support and upgrade fees then no re-licensing is needed. Baan has a document available to tell you all that you need to know on this upgrade. You will have to decide which way you will migrate your Oracle data to the new version. We chose to use the Oracle migration utility. It took about 4 hours to run as opposed to fully exporting and re-importing the data using Oracle EXPORT/IMPORT. The only difference in the methods was that in using the migration utility, it doesn't convert the row numbers to the new format. The conversion happens whenever the record is updated which adds some overhead. The EXP/IMP method does fully covert the row format to the new one. The trade off for us was to be able to upgrade over a weekend, or be down two weeks to do it. We have not seen any problem with using the migration utility method.

Gilbert Guymer
Database Administrator
Lufkin Industries, Inc.