MINIMIZE SYSTEM DOWNTIME WHEN UPGRADING ORACLE APPS

Time passes slowly while transactions cannot be made and money is lost during a business application outage. Many companies process millions of dollars a day through their Oracle Applications and a day's downtime can have significant impact on quarterly earnings. Unfortunately companies that upgrade their Oracle Application face the unavoidable obstacle of taking their mission-critical production systems offline during the upgrade. As the "Upgrading Oracle Applications Release 11i" manual states it:

"The crucial downtime period of an upgrade includes the time it takes to perform all the Category 3 and 4 upgrade steps and the time it takes for AutoUpgrade and AutoPatch to run. During this period, your users will not be able to use Oracle Applications."

Or, simply put, your business will be offline until your upgrade is completed and the amount of time is directly proportional to the size of your online transaction-processing (OLTP) database. Therefore, if you reduce your OLTP database by 30% you will also reduce the upgrade time by a significant amount of time.

The Challenge

Many companies need the new features that Oracle has made available through its latest application suite, but they also need to minimize the amount of time it takes to move from one version to the next. Therefore companies must control the amount of time that the production database is unavailable during the upgrade process and the best way to accomplish this is by reducing the size of the OLTP database through Oracle purge routines. Unfortunately, standard Oracle purges create another challenge. As stated in the Oracle Version 11.0 Inventory user manual:

"You should be extremely cautious when purging transaction information. Once you commit the process, Oracle Inventory removes all related information from the database. You cannot view or report on this information once you purge it."

Upon reading this, businesses are likely to be struck by one of two thoughts:

• "We can't ever purge our database because we need access to our older information,"
• "We'll need the IT department to build a custom application to store the purged data."

When you break these choices down, you realize that they offer some challenges as well. Option one -- maintaining an unpurged database that grows year upon year-means longer and longer downtimes during upgrades, escalating hardware upgrade costs, and continued degradation of system performance. Option two -- building a special application-involves thousands of hours of IT time designing, developing, and maintaining custom application code that is capable of collecting the purged data and making the data available to users who need it.

The Solution

OuterBay ArchiverT for Oracle Applications

The OuterBay Archiver offers an online solution that allows users to purge their OLTP database prior to the upgrade without giving up access to the purged data. While Oracle Applications' purge functions merely remove older data from the production database, the OuterBay Archiver uses those same purge functions to intelligently deposit purged data into a single OnLine Archive (OLA) database. Users can access this data in the OnLine Archive via the same forms and reports that they use in production database. Once the data is safely stored in an archive, a company can upgrade the smaller OLTP database with a significant reduction in the amount of time needed to execute the upgrade.

Other Benefits of the OuterBay Archiver

One of OuterBay Archiver's greatest benefits is almost a side effect. Regular purges of the production database greatly reduce the strain on system operations. By reducing the size of the database, a company can maintain an operational capacity that permits all transactions to occur on a timely basis without system slowdown, while at the same time lessening the risk of hardware failure due to growth.

And because the OuterBay Archiver provides users with immediate access to all data current and purged through the same application interface, companies avoid the considerable cost and complexity of supporting an outdated version of Oracle Applications environment in order to view the old data, as well as the cost associated with the retraining of employees.

The solution also resolves the chronic performance problems due to data growth. So long-term value is seen in savings for hardware upgrades, faster business results, and control of the production environment.

Conclusion

If a company does not remove data from its production database, poor system performance caused by data growth will eventually become too great a problem to ignore. When combined with the increases in maintenance costs, hardware needs, this becomes a crucial problem. Because removing your older data from your system entirely is not an option, the OuterBay Archiver is the solution.

Simply put, OuterBay Archiver:

• Minimizes production database downtime during upgrades
• Allows viewing of production and archive data using the same application interface
• Eliminates need to maintain legacy application, database and operating system versions
• Solves chronic problem of data growth
• Reduces hardware upgrade costs
• Enhances system performance
• Improves the bottom line

OuterBay Archiver provides an easily accessible and separate storage area in which to archive older data while significantly improving the performance of the company's mission-critical systems. It is a natural extension to Oracle Applications.

Contact Bill Morrow, OuterBay Technologies, 408-557-6100, bmorrow@outerbay.com www.outerbay.com.