Oracle Always Free Oracle Database upgrades

This post is a continuation of the series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

During APEX@Home I presented "Bringing the light in your Always FREE Autonomous Cloud".
You can watch the recorded presentation or look at the slides. During my presentation, I mentioned how to upgrade the database version you are on, opt-in, or wait for Oracle to upgrade your instance automatically. As I received an email today, I thought to write a quick blog post about it.

Oracle comes with new releases of the Oracle Database yearly and for Oracle Application Express (APEX) even twice a year. The Oracle Autonomous Cloud will upgrade the instance by itself, both for the database as for APEX. You don't really have control when this happens, but Oracle will let you know. This email I received today:


BUT, if you are really eager to get the newer functionalities sooner, this blog post shows you how.

When you log in to the Oracle Cloud and go to the details of your Autonomous Database Cloud, you will find under Actions - Create Clone.

Cloning is a great way to copy your entire instance and try different things with it. When doing for example a new project, you can start with the always free service and when development is done, clone the instance as a production instance. You can choose to have another free cloud or upgrade to a paid service.

In this case, I will use the Clone feature to upgrade my database to 19c myself.

You can do a full clone or metadata clone. I typically use a full clone, so all is there, tables, data and Oracle APEX apps.

When you clone, depending the time you have an option to select the database version. Today I could only select the 19c version, which is exactly what I wanted:

Hitting the Clone button and the instance is provisioned:

It takes a couple of minutes to complete but after that, there it is, your upgraded instance... well it's not really upgraded as you have both an 18c and 19c version now.

I confirmed the database with all my data and all my APEX workspaces and apps where there :)

Pretty cool!