Re: Heads Up on Grid Control 10.2

On 9/29/06, Kevin Closson <kevinc_at_polyserve.com> wrote:
>
>
> Back on thread. This post makes me ask, is it common out there
> to apply patchsets (not a "patch" from r1 to r2 as in th OP)
> to functional Oracle Homes? I should think a safer approach
> would be to install a new R1 home, apply R2 to it and if
> you are happy, switch over to it by dragging your TNS stuff
> over. Or is my views of the common Oracle Home as too
> simplistic? That is how I approach it here anyway. That is,
> until we finish implementing our filesystem snapshots in which
> case the patchset application process can be as junky as
> anyone could imagine and I wouldn't care. Just revert to a
> snapshot and make it writeable... not worries.
>
> Thoughts ?

Here's mine:

Today I patch the current oracle home.

What I would like to do in the future is clone the Oracle Home, patch it and and leave the old one behind for a few days as a failsafe if needed.

Sometimes it would be needed right away. :)

The only obstacles (I think) to doing so are managing the Oracle inventory.

Andy Rivenes has a great paper on managing Oracle apps from a DBA perspective,
which includes managing the Oracle Inventory.

http://appsdba.com/papers/oracle_utilities.pdf

Following the practice outlined in that paper would make it a simple matter to rename the Oracle Home, cp -r to the oldOracle Home name, patch it and restart the database.

This is also one of the techniques Jeremiah Wilton espouses for minimizing downtime when patching.

These techiques assume a unix like platform. Cloning on Windows is not covered. It can be done, but requires different (more work) techniques.

It's the registry ya know.

-- 
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

--
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