Vendors supporting patch levels

[Oracle 10g Enterprise on AIX 5L]

Hi Everyone,

It's me the neophyte dba again...I'm eager to patch our db's from 10.1.0.2 to 10.1.0.4, with the later being a prereq for the July 2005 Critical patch. We have no db's in production yet and have three vendors involved in this project. Internally, my request to patch our existing dev db's is met with extreme caution. The concern being that the vendors may or will not offer support if they haven't tested the patch themselves. Is this a normal situation? Personally I agree that we want have good relationships with the vendors, but I think they have a responsibility to respond to critical patches (install test and support to that level) in a timely manner.

To date I've informed my PM's that their is a critical patch for the db's and that since July the vulnerabilities are now public knowledge. Not sure if there's anything else I can or should do. Oh ya...I'm documenting this to cma.

Any words of wisdom are greatly appreciated.

Brian Peasey

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