Upgrading the Oracle Software

Upgrading Oracle Clusterware and Oracle RAC is performed in a manner very similar to patching. You can perform rolling upgrades, or you can shut down the Oracle Database and Oracle Clusterware software to perform the upgrde.

You can also perform an out-of-place upgrade of the Oracle software. To perform an out-of-place upgrade, you specify the location of the new Grid home in OUI instead of selecting the existing software location. When performing an out-of-place upgrade, the old and new version of the software are present on the nodes at the same time, each in a different home location, but only one version of the software is active at any given time.