Re: Multiple Homes & Oracle Patch Testing

Hi Michael,
do you specify the instance or the Oracle Home? From what I read in the patch instructions you tell it which Oracle Home (excerpt from instructions follows):

"Then follow the steps given below within the installer: On the Welcome screen, click the Next button. This will display the File Locations screen. The default location for the Source... entry field should already be pointing to the correct products.jar file needed for the patchset installation. Leave this field unchanged. **Select the Oracle Home** in which you wish to install the patchset from the drop down list of Oracle Homes or Oracle Home Names file. "

The client understandibly wants to be sure that if we apply the patch it has no chance of affecting the production instance. From the instructions the design of the patch install appears to be "Oracle Home" centric. In other words if you have multiple instances under one Oracle Home, you tell it what Home to apply it to, and applying the patch to that Home would affect all instances under that designated Home only.

If this is the case, to properly protect the production instance(s) from patch testing, in theory one could install a second Home, replicate the instances to that second Home, and test the patch on there.

Thats in theory..does that really work well? Or in practice does that suck?? Should I in fact keep the testing Home install on a completely separate box? That's what I'm trying to find out. As I've found with MS SQL, those "features" that look real pretty in the manuals don't always work well in practice. Not that that's ever true for Oracle..:)

Glen Moffitt DBA, MCSE
Homestreet Bank

mngong_at_yahoo.com (michael ngong) wrote in message news:<ecf365d5.0210230336.47c1e54_at_posting.google.com>...
> You may have to install more than one copy of the software one in each
> Oracle home.That will mean a little bit more disk space.
> Before starting an instance you may either have to manually set
> the Oracle home you want the instance to use, or do so in a
> configuration file.
> Luckily when you intend to put on a patch you have to state the
> instance you intend on patching.This should make life a little bit
> easier
> HTH
> Michael Tubuo Ngong
Received on Wed Oct 23 2002 - 15:14:33 CDT