In the middle of an upgrade but need a tools only copy of production
We are currently working on upgrading our HCM 9.1/PT8.50 database to HCM 9.2/PT8.53.
The initial pass worked well, getting us all of our customizations. We are now in the process of the second pass.
In previous upgrades we did (last one was over three years ago) we were able to NOT freeze our production environment, and throughout the upgrade ( which typically spans over a 9-12 month period due to time constraints), the DBA would occasionally take a copy of production and just do a tools upgrade. Then we would grab the recent customizations that were not in the previous pass and move them over to our upgraded copy of production.