Upgrading Oracle 7.3 to 10g

Question

Hello All,
We are planning to upgrade Oracle 7.3 to 10 g.
Is any one know what is hardware requirements for 10g on Sun Solaris or other UNIX System?
What we have Currently is as follows:
Operating System, SUN Solaris 5.5.1
For Production:
SUN Microsystems E450
2 X UltraSPARC-II 400MHz
1GB RAM
12 X 4.2GB hard-drives
Stagging
SUN Microsystems ULTRA2
UltraSPARC 200MHz
128MB RAM
3 X 9.0GB hard-drives
any feed back will be appreciated.
D

Answer 1

The referenced document refers to two methods of accomplishing the upgrade. One is to use the upgrade utility and the other is to manually execute the upgrade scripts. There is, however, a third way that is much easier and that gives you immediate access to all of the new features of the 10g database.
Both of the methods described in the document, which you should read no matter what you do, perform all of the upgrade changes to the existing database. This is why you cannot go directly from 7.3.4 to 10g. The scripts that are behind the process just will not run successfully in a 7.3.4 database. As a result, you would have to upgrade to 8.0.6 and then to 10g. This is the "supported" path, but you do not have to follow this path to achieve a successful upgrade.
The third upgrade scenario is to create a new 10g database using scripts that you have written that utilize all of the various new features that you would like to use such as locally managed tablespaces and undo management. Once this has been created and tuned up a bit, you would perform an export/import to get your application's code and data from the old database to the new.
In our enterprise, we have over 450 databases, and we just could not afford to take the time to follow the "supported" path. It would have taken too long, and we had only a few days to convert 272 of these with more time for the rest. As a result, we built our own create scripts for the new databases, ran those in advance of our worldwide deployment date, and then we used the export and import tools to move our application code and data. This was a lot easier than the "official" method, and it works.
The advantage to this approach is that it is straightforward and does not involve Oracle's upgrade tools which many have had problems using. The disadvantage is that you really have to know what you are doing. If you are not an experienced DBA, you may not have the wherewithal to successfully execute this method.
Kind regards,
Russ Cannon