RE: Oracle EM Provisioning/patching pack

Thanks for the info - just to be clear, I'm really not subtly pitching my product, nor complaining that people think about using OEM for these things. I'm just curious whether there's anyone using OEM to do this stuff, or if they've even given it a shot, especially since Oracle is pushing OEM pretty hard (re: one of the posts in the previous thread).

We see an interesting mix of people, where as you say, some have patching mandates, and others just patch as they hit bugs. Some shops seem to do big sweeps, where once a year, they gird for battle and apply one CPU and some recommended bug fixes they'd run into in specific areas across the board.

Thanks,
Matt

-----Original Message-----

From: Niall Litchfield [mailto:niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com] Sent: Tue 5/5/2009 9:23 AM
To: Matthew Zito
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Oracle EM Provisioning/patching pack  

Patching, we don't need no stinking patching!  

Or more seriously, most of our clients don't patch database systems in a policy driven manner, but on an 'as-needed' basis. 'As-needed' usually being driven by support, business users or occasionally enlightened infrastructure folks that think running infrastructure systems that have publicly available exploits is a bad idea. I'll confess to being unfamiliar with your particular product offerings, but the OEM patching stuff seems to match clients that say 'We want to patch all our databases from 9.2.0.4 to 9.2.0.8', or else 'we want to apply all CPU patches withing 2 months of release'. We don't have many customers that a) have such a policy and b) have so many systems that overtime for the dba team is excessively expensive.  

I'm not even going to touch the system test before patching issue here, it exists though. I will offer that most MS shops do have an OS patching policy and it is easier to engage with management of such shops on patching/update requirements than it is with *nix shops. This is only partly a technical issue, it's mostly cultural.  

Niall

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Matthew Zito <mzito_at_gridapp.com> wrote:

        Hey all,         

        The recent thread on OEM's pluses and minuses got me thinking, but I didn't want to completely hijack the thread, so I figured I'd start a new one. It seems like most people use OEM/GC for day-to-day DBA activities - monitoring, checking utilization, running basic database commands, and for performance tuning, basically the tuning and diagnostic pack.         

        I'm curious as to why no one mentioned the provisioning pack, which Oracle markets as a solution for patching, database creation, cloning, etc. Is it too expensive? Does it not work? Are patching and deployment just not a problem for the folks on this list? What about RAC - it's supposed to be able to do RAC deployment, has anyone tried that?         

        As full disclosure, my company makes a software product that, among many other things, patches database, deploys RAC clusters, automates upgrades, etc. The reason I'm asking is when we're meeting with companies at trade shows, etc., a commonly heard refrain is, "Oh, OEM provisioning pack does all that stuff". Once we dig into it a bit, though, they've usually never tried it, or don't run OEM at all.         

        So, I figured I'd ask the list- have you ever used the provisioning pack, and what did you think? If you don't use it, why not? If people would prefer to email me off-list, I'll aggregate the info, anonymize it, and send it back to the list?         

	Thanks,
	Matt
	
	--
	Matthew Zito
	Chief Scientist
	GridApp Systems
	P: 646-452-4090
	mzito_at_gridapp.com
	http://www.gridapp.com <http://www.gridapp.com/> 
	
	

--

Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Tue May 05 2009 - 08:46:06 CDT