A new OGG challenge: Migrate an Oracle 8.1.7.4 instance to 10.2.0.5

Yes, these beasts still exist in production:

[/u01/appl/ora817]$ sqlplus /nolog

SQL*Plus: Release 8.1.7.0.0 - Production on Thu Apr 27 09:54:20 2017

(c) Copyright 2000 Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

SQL> connect / as sysdba 
Connected.
SQL> select * from v$version;

BANNER
----------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle8i Enterprise Edition Release 8.1.7.4.0 - Production
PL/SQL Release 8.1.7.4.0 - Production
CORE    8.1.7.0.0       Production
TNS for Solaris: Version 8.1.7.4.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 3.4.1.0.0 - Production

First question: Is there a version of GoldenGate which is able to extract from Oracle 8.1.7.4 on Solaris 8? Yes there is: p9271762_1040_SOLARIS64.zip. When you want to download that you’ll have to create a service request with Oracle Support because these old releases are password protected and you have to agree that you do not get any support for this.

The schema check script referenced here: Oracle GoldenGate database Complete Database Profile check script for Oracle DB (All Schemas) Classic Extract (Doc ID 1298562.1) has quite a few issues with 8.1.7.4 as it references columns in the dictionary that do not exist in this version of Oracle (e.g. the checks for compression on table and tablespace level) but you can still use the output and do some hand work.

The documentation for GoldenGate 10.4 is still online.

This will be an interesting project 🙂