Simon Krenger

While upgrading an environment to Oracle 12c, one thing that needs to be done is to upgrade the RMAN catalog. One change introduced by Oracle is that there are new features used in the version 12 RMAN catalog. So if you try to upgrade an RMAN catalog running on Oracle Standard Edition, you will encounter the following error:

RMAN> upgrade catalog;

error creating create_deleted_object_seq
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-06004: ORACLE error from recovery catalog database: ORA-00439: feature not enabled: Partitioning

Mike Dietrich from the Oracle Upgrade blog has written an excellent article concerning this issue. Most specifically, MOS Note 1927265.1 notes implicitly that Enterprise Edition is a requirement:

From 12.1.0.2 partitioning is a requirement for the recovery catalog.

This is an undocumented requirement.

Note that you do not need an Enterprise Edition license, as it is covered in the license documentation:

The infrastructure repositories for RMAN, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, AWR Warehouse, and Global Data Services Catalog can be shared in one database, or deployed in separate databases. Enterprise Edition must be used for the infrastructure repository database(s).

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