Re: Metalink and availability

Thanks Jeremiah, I will take a look at that.

10 minutes is definitely a big improvement over an hour.

The problems I have run into however have been on Windows machines - no relinking.

Things may go smoothly on a test system, but not quite so smoothly on production, taking more time. It has happened more than once on Windows (for me at least) that some steps had to be repeated as they would fail on the first attempt.

(can't recall at the moment just which ones)

The fact that the backout scripts generated by Opatch on Windows do not work as is does not help. (The CALL command has be inserted where the BAT script calls other scripts )

I don't think you can replace the binaries while in use either, as they will be locked by Windows while in use.

Jared

On 5/25/06, Jeremiah Wilton <jeremiah_at_ora-600.net> wrote:
>
> The thing that takes the most time with the CPU patches on Unix is that
> Opatch patches and relinks one binary at a time serially. Having the
> database down is completely unnecessary for many of these binaries, such
> as
> sqlplus etc. Furthermore, even running binaries like oracle and tnslsnr
> can
> be relinked with the databases open and running, and staged as alternately
> named files (oracle-new, tnslsnr-new). You can then move them all into
> place during a very brief outage for all instances.
>
> There are a number of tricks that you can use to greatly reduce the apply
> time for the CPU patches. Start with the one-off patch apply guidelines
> in
> my paper:
>
> http://www.ora-600.net/articles/stayinalive.pdf
>
> Remember that CPU patches also often have SQL to run, so you will have to
> determine when you should run that. It should be possible to push the new
> binaries into place, come up in single-node/restricted session, run the
> SQL
> and then restart into multi-user RAC mode. Maybe you can bring the patch
> time down to 10 minutes on a RAC system.
>
> Not great, but better than an hour.
>
> Jeremiah Wilton
> ORA-600 Consulting
> http://www.ora-600.net
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Jared Still
> ...
> The quarterly security patches cannot be applied in a rolling
> fashion however.
>
> Does anyone think they can apply even one of the CPU
> patch sets in 53 minutes to a RAC system?
>
> Not that I've tried it - we do not have any RAC systems.
>
> Applying the a single CPU to one of our SAP systems
> in less than an hour is quite a challenge at times.
>
>
>

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

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l