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RE: Best practice for backing out of Application Patches

From: Mercadante, Thomas F <NDATFM_at_labor.state.ny.us>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:14:25 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005113D6.20021203121425@fatcity.com>


Scott,

Of course, the answer is "It depends".

It all depends on the kind of software patches that are being applied.

Are you talking about adding a column to a table that allows nulls? There might not be a need to back this patch out - the column might be able to stay depending on how it is used during an insert or select statment. If the application does not use the column, then removing it from the table might need to be done. On the other hand, if you are using version 8.1.7, you can always drop the column from the table.

If your patches are just updates to schema views, you can always simply e-apply the prior version of the views to back the updates out of the database.

see, it all depends on the kind of schema update that was performed. and it can get very complicated when you are talking about foreign keys - literally hundreds of tables could be involved - and you probably do not want to be trying to figure out what got touched by an update.

probably the best answer is - to back all database changes out of a schema, perform a database point-in-time restore back to before you applied the patches. if I had your job, and this was a purchased application, this is what I would do.

hope this helps.

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 2:25 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

>Sorry, I forgot a Subject title!
>
>Gurus,
>
>I was just given a project to maintain a Computerized Maintenance
>Management System. When I asked the companies support staff how to roll
>back patches in the backend Oracle Database (Ver. 8174), they said that
>there was no way to do this. I'm guessing I could use logminer just
>incase a patch doesn't work. Would this be a good solution, or are there
>other (better) ways of safeguarding myself when it comes to
>patching? Obviously, I will be applying the patches to a test instance
>first, but I don't want to have to go back to restore from a backup if the
>patch causes unexpected issues.
>
>TIA!
-Scott Stefick



Scott Stefick
UNIX Systems Administrator
Oracle Certified Professional DBA
Wm. Rainey Harper College
847.925.6130
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Received on Tue Dec 03 2002 - 14:14:25 CST

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