Automated In-Place Upgrade for Process
- You have no process usage (running or completed instances), or
- Your process usage is in a pre-production state, or
- You have short-lived process instances that can be completed in Oracle Integration Generation 2 before upgrade, or
- You are only using decision applications.
If this upgrade option fits your situation, complete the steps detailed in this topic.
Prepare Your Initial Upgrade Environment
Oracle recommends that you first perform these steps on a non-production instance that isn't critical to your business. These steps may a while to complete, and this initial upgrade may identify issues that you need to resolve or account for prior to production upgrade.
If you have one of the following environments, you should follow the steps in this section to create a temporary environment for upgrade validation:
- If you're running production workloads in a single production instance and you don't have a non-production instance, any issues you encounter could cause downtime for process users.
- If your environment consists of a production instance and a single non-production instance that you rely on for backup and urgent fixes, you would be left without the backup until your production environment is upgraded.
If you have multiple non-production instances, you can skip to Upgrade Your Non-Production Environment.
To create a temporary environment for upgrade validation, perform the following steps:
- Create a new Oracle Integration Generation 2 instance.
- Copy your design-time metadata to the new instance.
The metadata can come from either a production or non-production instance. However, using production instance metadata means that you'll be more prepared for what you need to do when it's time to upgrade your actual production instance.
- Continue with the steps in Upgrade Your Non-Production Environment, and then test the upgrade.
When you're ready to upgrade your other instances, you can export your refactored integrations and process applications to speed up the post-upgrade tasks for the instance that acted as the source of your copied design-time metadata.
Upgrade Your Non-Production Environment
If you don't have a non-production instance, Oracle recommends you create a temporary environment for upgrade validation as described above.
Perform the following steps on your non-production environment.
| Task | When to perform the task | Who performs the task | Task details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Analyze any design-time gaps | Before upgrade | You |
In the Process Automation precheck, expand More details and note any issues. See How Upgrade Affects Process Features for workarounds or alternate solutions. You'll need to implement these options after upgrade to restore and activate your process applications. If you're using an unsupported feature and you're unable to follow the suggestions, contact your Oracle representative or file a service request. |
| Bypass the active instances precheck | Before upgrade | You |
Select Ignore active instances and proceed with upgrade, and then click Save changes. You will be asked to confirm your choice twice. WARNING: Selecting this option will result in the loss of running (in-progress) and completed process instances. Be careful when selecting this option, especially in a production instance.After you select this option, the Process Automation precheck changes to a warning, indicating that the precheck has been bypassed. |
| Reschedule your upgrade | Before upgrade | You |
If necessary, reschedule your non-production instance upgrade. |
| Limit development work | Two to three days before upgrade | You |
During the two days leading up to the upgrade, pause or limit your development work as much as possible. Any changes that you make are saved, but they might cause the upgrade check to fail. In such cases, the upgrade would need to be re-scheduled. For example:
|
| Upgrade Process | During upgrade | Oracle |
During upgrade, Oracle performs the following steps:
Note: Process instance data is not migrated to Oracle Integration 3. This means you won't see historical transactions created in Oracle Integration Generation 2 after upgrade. |
| Complete post-upgrade tasks | After upgrade | You |
Perform post-upgrade activities to restore your process applications to working order. See Service-Level Post-Upgrade Tasks for Process Automation. If your process applications are part of a solution that involves Visual Builder or integrations, you may need to perform additional steps to update your other clients. See Update Clients that Call Process Applications. |
Upgrade Additional Non-Production Environments
If you have additional non-production environments, you can perform the pre-upgrade steps from the table above. However, instead of completing the post-upgrade tasks, you might want to export your restored process applications and related artifacts (for example, Visual Builder applications) from the first environment and import them into the additional environments after upgrade. This could save you time not having to perform the post-upgrade steps on multiple environments.
Upgrade Your Production Environment
If you want to follow this upgrade process for a production environment, be aware of the following:
- You may need to limit business users from creating new transactions prior to upgrade.
- You'll need to identify and complete running transactions prior to upgrade.
- There will be some downtime after upgrade to perform post-upgrade tasks. During this time, your business will not be able to run new processes.
- Process instance data is not migrated to Oracle Integration 3. This means you won't see historical transactions created or completed in Oracle Integration Generation 2 after upgrade.
Before deciding to proceed with this upgrade process:
- Evaluate how many running transactions are in your environment, and complete these transactions prior to upgrade. To view the running transactions:
- Sign in to your Oracle Integration Generation 2 instance as a user with the Service Administrator role.
- Click My Tasks, then choose Processes.
- Save runtime data from Oracle Integration Generation 2 Process. This step is important to ensure that you don't lose the history of completed transactions. You must do this before upgrade. See Archiving and Purging Process Automation Data in Oracle Integration.
As part of these steps, you'll configure the Oracle Storage Service and schedule instances for archive and purge. Be aware of the following points:
- The archived information will be available in the configured Object Storage bucket.
- Attachments aren't included in the archive files. You must export these manually. See Retrieve a Process Attachment as a Stream in REST API for Oracle Integration 2.
If you decide to proceed with this upgrade process for your production environment, perform the steps from the table above.