Introduction:

More then one year ago i had set up an Oracle restart environment  with Grid Infra, ASM and Databases all in 11.2.0.2.0 since that was a requirement from vendor at first. Once the server had been handed over to production  I got the request that it should also host EMC  based  Clones and those clones where 11.2.0.3.0. That meant i had to upgrade both Grid infrastructure and the database software and of course the databases as well.

So i geared up , did an upgrade of the GI and the Rdbms software and of course of the local databases in place. After that  the Emc clones had been added and every thing  looked fine .

Until ……….

Error Messages after Server reboot:

Well until the server got rebooted. After that server reboot a first sign that things where wrong was that the databases , did not start via the grid infra structure which was not expected !

So there I was again ready for solving another puzzle and of course people waiting for the DBs to come online so they could work.

## First clue:

I checked the Resource ( the database ) in the cluster with:   crsctl status resource ….  –p

Much to my surprise that showed the wrong oracle home ( it was 11.2.0.2.0 the initial Oracle Home before upgrade). But I was so sure that I had upgraded the database.. What did i miss . Even more strange was that the Cluster agent kept altering my oratab  for the specific database to have the old oracle home ( and  it would almost stick out tongue at me telling  #line has been added by agent ).

## Second clue

When i altered the oratab to show the correct oracle home i could start the database via sqlplus which was indeed my second clue .

After a big face-palm it became clear to me that the cluster was not having correct status in the cluster ware about that Oracle Home ..

## Will srvctl modify do the Job:

srvctl modify database -d mydb -o /opt/oracle/product/11203_ee_64/db

##output:

PRCD-1027 : Failed to retrieve database mydb

PRCD-1229 : An attempt to access configuration of database migoms was rejected because its version 11.2.0.2.0 differs from the program version 11.2.0.3.0. Instead run the program from /opt/oracle/product/11202_ee_64/db

Well that was not expected.  Especially since that other clue was that the db can be started as 1120.3 db when oracle env is put properly in ORATAB.

##Solution:

First I tried :

srvctl modify database -d mydb -o /opt/oracle/product/11203_ee_64/db

but that is wrong as we already saw in this post.

Hmm then i thought of an expression in German. once you start doing it the right way  things will start to work for you :

Plain and simple this is what  I have to do making things right again:

srvctl upgrade database -d  mydb -o /opt/oracle/product/11203_ee_64/db

After that I started mydb via cluster she is happy now.

## Bottom-line ( aka lesson learned ).

If you upgrade your databases in on an oracle Restart /  Rac cluster environment make it part of your upgrade plan to upgrade the information in the clusterlayer of that specific database.

As always,

Happy Reading and till we meet again.

Mathijs