Category: Standard Edition

EBR – Part 1: Overview and Setup

This is a link to an index page for all the parts of the series

I have been using EBR in a real production system for more than 4 years now.
EBR – an acronym for Edition-Based Redefinition – is a powerful and unique feature (or, more precisely, a set of features) that enables patching and upgrading live Oracle-based applications in an online fashion, with zero downtime.

As an Oracle Developer and DBA I find EBR one of the most important tools in my toolkit, and I take advantage of every opportunity to let other Oracle developers and DBAs know about it.

I love EBR because:

  • It enables us to do any change to active production systems – from a small bug fix to a major version upgrade – in an online fashion, using hot rollover: we expose a new version (a new edition) while users are still using the old version, and different users may use two (or even more) versions at the same time.
  • We perform the upgrade in the privacy of a new unexposed edition, which is a huge benefit, in my opinion, because it eliminates the regular pressure of completing the upgrade as soon as possible to reduce downtime, and the stress of not making any harm by mistake to a live system.
  • We can do the upgrade at any time, not necessarily at off-peak hours.
  • And EBR is supported in all the editions (since Oracle 11.2), including standard edition, and requires no special license.

I’m starting today a series of posts about Continue reading “EBR – Part 1: Overview and Setup”

OTN Appreciation Day: Edition-Based Redefinition

Here’s my contribution to the OTN Appreciation Day.

Edition-Based Redefinition (EBR) is a really great feature, or more accurately a set of features, that was introduced in Oracle 11.2 and allows for online application upgrades using hot rollover. If you know me then you know that I talk (ok, preach) about it a lot, and from a long and successful experience.

It is impossible to learn EBR in 5 minutes, but perhaps you’ll understand why I like EBR from this 5-minute introduction-concise-summary video, and hopefully you’ll be intrigued to learn more:

Creating an Index on a Static Table Referenced by an Active Table

We have a parent-child pair of tables with a foreign key constraint between them, and we need to add an index to the parent table, while the application is active.

The parent table is static during the creation of the index (no DML on it), but lots of DML statements are done on the child table. The parent table is relatively big, so the index creation takes a relatively significant time.

Continue reading “Creating an Index on a Static Table Referenced by an Active Table”