When you upgrade the database, you can perform a full upgrade
or soft upgrade:
- A full upgrade is a complete upgrade of the database.
When you perform a full upgrade, you cannot connect to the database with an
older version of and
you cannot revert back to the previous version. Elsewhere in the documentation,
when the term "upgrade" is used without any qualification, it means a full
upgrade.
- A soft upgrade allows you to run a newer version of against
an existing database without having to fully upgrade the database. This means
that you can continue to run an older version of against
the database. However, if you perform a soft upgrade, certain features will
not be available to you until you perform a full upgrade. Specifically, new
features that affect the structure of a database are not available with a soft
upgrade. For a list of the new features in a release, see the Release Notes for
that release.