RE: Question on database fleet maintenance patching
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 09:34:46 +0000
Message-ID: <25214_1577698494_5E09C4BE_25214_2427_1_8d97e480d0cd40db9d6f6c6c5885643d_at_vontobel.com>
A mature automation checks everything at the end and gives the unambiguous feedback if the patching was successful. I even went so far to automatically perform the rollback on failure. The risk of “going awry” can be massively reduced by testing the process on a production clone.
Patching (and even upgrade) process is kicked off by the application people per self-service. A DBA is on-call to cover the worst case scenario, which, by the way, has never happened. As Mladen mentioned, there were some issues after Oracle changed their patching process, but there are workarounds (see, for example, https://nenadnoveljic.com/blog/simultaneous-patching-not-possible-datapatch/ ). These are kind of issues that should be discovered on test databases.
I’d definitely trust this well-tested automation more than a human, especially when patching lots of databases.
Best regards,
Nenad
But, do you REALLY want to trust patching your databases that presumably contain data of greater than zero value to some automated process? I’ve seen too many patch processes “go awry” to want to trust automation.
That said, of course you SHOULD have some sort of script that you run repeatedly (avoid typos or sequencing errors); but, automation as in “unattended” would not be my choice.
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