Upgrading to 11g

I feel very fortunate that my current client is planning to upgrade a significant production system to Oracle 11g very shortly – you can’t get to know something like this properly until you use it in anger and work through the problems in a time-constrained environment. And I get the impression that there are very few production 11g sites out there. So it will be a good experience and it will look good for me.

Some say that 11g is no more than 10gR3, nevertheless it’s a bold upgrade decision – we’ll be going from 9i Standard Edition to 11g Enterprise Edition and switching from Windows to Linux (with a delayed phase of RAC thrown in).

It’s a bit like going from a Ford Focus to a Ferrari (but I’ll keep my thoughts on the futility of certain aspects of this to the RAC rant).

The upgrade is scheduled for March or Aprial and, so far, things have looked relatively pain free. In terms of general performance, not unexpectedly, Oracle 11g on Linux seems significantly faster than 9i on Windows.

The changes we have had to make so far seem mostly to concern changes in XML behaviour (change that actually mostly happened in 10gR2, but we’ve skipped that generation).
For example:

• In 9i, if you tried to create an XML element with a space in the tag name using XMLELEMENT, the space would be replaced with “_x0020_”. In 11i, the space is preserved as a space. I’m not convinced by this change in behaviour as an element surely cannot have a space in it’s name. Anyway, in those unwise places where spaces have been used, these tags will have to change in both our client and database code.
• There has been a change in behaviour regarding dates within XMLELEMENTs. In 9i, a date without an explicit format would pick up the default NLS_DATE_FORMAT of the session. In 11g, the date format will be YYYY-MM-DD. So, to preserve our 9i behaviour, we need to TO_CHAR our dates in XML so that they pick up the session format.
• When using XMLFOREST in 9i, empty columns would result in no tag being present in the resultant XML. Although deliberate, I think there’s something dodgy about this behaviour anyway. However, it’s changed slightly now we’re in 11g. Columns with not null columns will always produce a tag, even if empty (consider outer joins to tables with not null colums). Empty nullable columns continue to have their tags omitted. I’m not sure how we will address this in our particular situation (empty tags cause us issues if the client entity is not a nullable object, but if the tag is missing apparently the whole enigma is avoided. Somehow!). The solution certainly won’t involve changing not null columns to nullable, but, to limit changes in both client and database, it could involve using XSL to strip out empty tags.

I anticipate further issues to come out of the wash however I expect the majority of these to only reveal themselves post-production upgrade. There are bound to be some statements that degrade significantly but it might not be until the business do their daily thing day-in day-out that the most significant problems for them float to the surface (as opposed to things that are most obvious from automated load testing which I am always doubtful regarding the efficacy thereof).