Oracle 8.1.7.4 to 9.2.0.8

Today I moved an old production database from 8.1.7.4 to 9.2.0.8, and I hope this is the end of v8 for me.

It has become increasingly difficult to remember the quirks of 8.1.7, what was introduced at 9i and 10g and that ever nagging worry that if something went wrong with the database I was up the creek (and never mind the paddle, I hadn't even got a canoe).

I took the sensible approach and created a shiney new 9.2.0.8 instance and did an export, import.  Simples.

With a few additional grants and synonyms to be rebuilt followed by statistic setting up, it was pretty much all done within an hour.

Interestingly, the only reason to upgrade it was because the windows 2000 server it was sat on was dying a death and it had to move to another server.  Too good an opportunity to miss really.

But why only 9i?  That's what the application that is using the database is certified to!  Sigh

I think it says something fairly good for Oracle that 8.1.7.4 was good enough to just keeping on chugging along, doing what it was supposed to be doing without any problems.

So now it has moved from a very out of support database version to an out of support version.  Sigh again.

It is sat behind a firewall, it only has background services attaching to it, no 'real' users.  So the security I have put in place will be adequate for what it is but it falls a long way short of the tidy 11.2 databases I am now running in other areas.