Re: Policy on Oracle Versions and Patches

Thanks

I do have time to read release notes, in fact I read them very carefully.
For example, in Release Notes for 9.2.0.8 on Lunix x86:

Section 5.1.5:
All databases that use any features of Oracle Streams must be upgraded to release 9.2.0.2 or later. Operation between release 9.2.0.1 and release 9.2.0.2 is not supported for databases using Oracle Streams features.

Section 5.2
Beginning with patch set release 9.2.0.7, INSO software is no longer shipped with Oracle Text

Section 10.4
In release 9.2.0.4 and earlier, the maximum number of cursors that could be cached for fast lookup by PL/SQL was bounded by the value of the OPEN_CURSORS initialization parameter.

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This tells me that Oracle introduced new features and what they call


"behaviour" in patch sets.


In fact we installed 10.2.0.4 recently and then had to switch back to
10.2.0.3 it as outer join returned wrong result.

I also talk to Oracle Support on a regular basis and they tell me
things like


"The problems with subpools (of the shared pool) started around

9.2.0.4"

10.2 does not seem to be stable, we had quite a few crashes
(bloom_filter thing, ORA-00600 [kcbget_37], etc).
I think stable versions are 7.3.4.5, 8.1.7.4, 9.2.0.8.

Regarding "supported" - ask Oracle for password to download patch
2421054 for 9.2.0.8 on AIX 5L - officially this patch has been
available since May 2008.