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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: patches
John - Excellent points.
Patrice - One factor to consider is that patches tend to be tested very
little by the software vendor. Full releases get tested extensively, but
even then there are gaps, because well, we wouldn't be having patches
otherwise.
If you've ever been a developer at a software vendor, what happens is one customer reports an error. You verify the error and create a patch to fix that specific error. But no comprehensive system testing is done. You ship that patch to fix that problem.
Sometimes a vendor will bundle a group of patches together into a patch bundle. Here the testing is much more extensive than for the single patch, but still far short of the extensive full release testing.
Dennis Williams
DBA, 40%OCP
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 7:44 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
I think I veer towards Yechiel's view here Patrice. I am not sure I have
ever heard anyone suggest applying all outstanding relevant patches to a
database however much you test first. (To be honest you are not advocating
that, just raising the question).
Normal policy wherever I have worked is not to patch unless absolutely
necessary.
Another point is that 1 patch can provide a new code piece of binary and patches are not cumulative. Therefore applying patch a then patch b could well mean that patch a is overwritten and yet your documentation indicates that it has been installed.
HTH John
-----Original Message-----
Sent: 02 December 2002 12:54
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Yechiel,
If that's your philosophy, and there are known unpatched bugs in the server software, how can you be 100 percent sure it will stay up?
Granted, many of these bugs are esoteric, but not all.
I am curious what Oracle Support consultants do when they have a 24x7 contract, with all these patches. Surely they have a list.
Regards,
Patrice Boivin
Systems Analyst (Oracle Certified DBA)
[Boivin, Patrice J] -----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, November 29, 2002 3:49 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
We only apply patches as needed and where needed. For example: I had a problem with export taking a long time on one system. I installed a patch for this problem (after testing in test environment of course) only on that database.
My motto is: If it ain't broken do not fix it.
I have seen too many follow up fixes to install something I do not need.
Yechiel Adar
Mehish
I am wondering how your sites handle patching production servers.
I just did a search in MetaLink, since 8174 was released there have been 48 patches (if I just select RDBMS).
If I select other items in my search, I get upwards of 70 additional bug fixes.
How do high reliability sites handle patching? I assume they would rather fix potential problems (testing the patches on a testbed of course) rather than just apply bug fixes as problems are encountered on production servers.
regards,
Patrice Boivin
Systems Analyst (Oracle Certified DBA)
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