Once this has been done, login as the 'oracle' user, mount the Oracle CD and start the Oracle Installer Application.

Then proceed to install all the necessary Oracle components into the $NEWDIR. This directory will become the new $ORACLE_HOME.

Once the install has been completed, you will need to copy the following all initialization parameter files from the old $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory into $NEWDIR/dbs. Remember that oracle checks the initialization parameter file(s) during instance startup.

Each file must in the form init<$ORACLE_SID>.ora, but this file can subsequently reference other files with no name restriction using the ifile= parameter.

Once this file copy is complete. Check each parameter file copied and change any explicit references to the old $ORACLE_HOME to $NEW_DIR. (Implicit references to $ORACLE_HOME using ? are fine and should not be changed.).

You do not have to worry about moving any datafiles, logfiles, and controlfiles. Remember that Oracle checks the parameter file(s) during instance startup for the locations of controlfiles, and from the controlfiles determines the locations of everything else.

At this point, you just about set to convert the database. set $ORACLE_SID=$NEWDIR. You can do this manually or by modifying the /etc/oratab file to point to $NEWDIR and re-running oraenv. Also make sure the $PATH environment variable contains $NEWDIR/bin instead of the old $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory.

Invoke Server Manager, connect as the 'internal' user, and then startup the database.

The database should startup normally at this point.

Now comes the hard part. You must migrate all objects within the database to the new revision. Position yourself into the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory, and do a file listing of for all cat7*.sql scripts as shown below

bash-2.01$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin
bash-2.01$ ls cat7*.sql
cat50101.sql  cat711.sql    cat713pr.sql  cat7202.sql   cat7303.sql
cat50102.sql  cat712.sql    cat714.sql    cat7203.sql
cat7102d.sql  cat712d.sql   cat715.sql    cat7301.sql
cat7103.sql   cat712pd.sql  cat716.sql    cat7301d.sql
cat7106.sql   cat713.sql    cat7201.sql   cat7302.sql

Each cat*.sql script incrementally upgrades your database to the version listed in its filename..

To UPGRADE your DATABASE, you MUST RUN EACH cat7*.sql script that has a version number greater than your original version of the database

You must also run each cat7*.sql script in order from lowest to highest.

For example, if you want are currently, at version 7.2.1 of the Oracle RDBMS, and want to upgrade your database to version 7.3.3, you must run the following scripts in the order below:

cat7202.sql
    cat7203.sql
    cat7301.sql
    cat7301d.sql
    cat7302.sql
    cat7303.sql

Once your database is upgraded, you must then rebuild the data dictionary & default PL/SQL packages by running the following (also in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin)

catalog.sql
    catproc.sql

Once the above two scripts are run, the database upgrade is complete.
Note that running the above two scripts will invalidate all stored packages/functions/procedures so you will need to recompile them before they can be used.

For multiple database running on the same machine, the above procedures must be performed on each database.