ORA-01173 Opening PDB in Upgrade Mode

I am working on upgrading a Multitenant environment from Oracle 12.1.0.2 to Oracle 19c. I have 40 PDBs supporting all sorts of dev and test environments. We typically upgrade a few dev databases first and then follow with test databases before upgrading production. When production is upgraded, we like to keep a few dev databases around at the old version for a period of time. This way, if someone thinks the database upgrade caused a problem, we can repeat the test in the old version to verify. All of this is a long way of saying that I cannot upgrade the CDB along with all of its PDBs at the same time.

To upgrade, I chose to prepare the PDB for upgrade and unplug it form the 12.1.0.2 CDB. The PDB is then plugged into a 19.3 CDB, opened in upgrade mode and then upgrade. All of this is documented here.

So the PDB is prepacked and unplugged form the old version CDB. The PDB is then plugged into the new version CDB and opened in Upgrade mode when I get this error:

SQL> alter session set container=my_PDB;

Session altered. 

SQL> alter pluggable database open upgrade; 
alter pluggable database open upgrade 

ERROR at line 1: 
ORA-01173: data dictionary indicates missing data file from system tablespace 

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Oracle Support told me the ORA-1173 error indicates corruption in the Data Dictionary. This never made any sense to me. The PDB does not contain any data dictionary for the data files. That is stored in the CDB. If you query DBA_DATA_FILES in the PDB, its just a pass-through to the CDB filtering out other files not belonging to that PDB. When the PDB is unplugged, the datafile information is written to a XML file. If there is any dictionary corruption it would occur when the XML file is generated or when the PDB is plugged in. Yet we verified the XML file’s contents are accurate and so is the Data Dictionary contents after being plugged in. The ORA-1173 is not accurate to the root cause of my problem.

After three months of working with Oracle Support, I never obtained a resolution. However, I have devised a workaround. I received the ORA-1173 error when the 19c CDB was created fresh at that version. However, when I created a new, empty 12.1.0.2 CDB and upgraded it to 19.3, I did not receive the ORA-1173 error when opening a plugged-in PDB in upgrade mode. So that is my workaround. Create the new CDB then upgrade it to the target version.