Re: Patching Oracle without shutting down the database

Vsevolod Afanassiev wrote:
> Somehow it appears to be possible to patch Oracle on AIX 5.3 without
> shutting down the
> databases - and everything works fine!
> - We have several AIX 5.3 servers running Oracle 9.2.0.7.0 Enterprise
> Edition
> - Partitioning Option wasn't installed
> - I installed partitioning option by running 9.2.0.1.0 Installer, then
> 10g Installer then comes with 9.2.0.7.0 Patch Set, and then Patch
> 5496862 using OPatch - and then realised that the database was up.
> - Everything seems OK, there were no errors during installation,
> timestamp on the file $ORACLE_HOME/bin/oracle shows that it was
> re-created, I can shut down and start the database, partitioning works
> - The experiment was repeated on the second server with 6 databases
> running - same result.
>
> Is it a feature of AIX?

Dunno but you are playing with fire by having running oracle instances that have loaded into memory oracle executables and shared library routines that are now being changed.

Certainly this is not recommended and does not correspond with the oracle documentation on applying patchsets.

If you really want to proceed with this question working with oracle support directly is the only valid way to proceed. Received on Mon Nov 13 2006 - 07:07:54 CST