Oracle International Corporation

Guhan Viswanathan

Kumar Rajamani

Jaebock Lee

William H Waddington

Shrikanth Shankar

Susan M Kotsovolos

Chandrasekharan Iyer

Rajagopalan Govindarajan

Philip Yam

David M Alpern

Russell John Green

Ho Chak Hung

Alan Choi

A database may facilitate zero-downtime upgrades by concurrently maintaining multiple editions of database objects for use by both pre-upgrade and post-upgrade clients of a database application. Operations performed within the database are associated with an edition based on, for example, an initiating client or transaction. When an operation references an object or data, the database automatically performs the operation using the object or data associated with the edition with which the operation is itself associated. The database may determine the associated edition without explicit identification of the associated edition in a query or in code. Thus, no client or stored procedure code changes are necessary to reflect a new edition added during an update. Data changes in one edition may be automatically and immediately propagated to the other edition through the use of cross-edition triggers, thereby allowing both pre-upgrade and post-upgrade clients to remain fully functional throughout an upgrade.

Low-downtime and zero-downtime upgrades of database-centric applications

A method and apparatus for updating databases are disclosed. An update vector for an object is created for identifying updated attributes. A dependent object is identified and a dependency vector of the dependent object is compared with update vector to determine whether the dependent object depends on the updated attributes.

Finer grain dependency tracking for database objects

Growing community of inventors

Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Guhan Viswanathan