Exadata BP5 Patching Issues

We’re in the process of applying Exadata Bundle Patch 5, and ran into an issue I wanted to share.

Step 5 in the post-install instructions in the README says:

5. Recompile all invalid objects before using in catmet2

@?/rdbms/admin/utlrp.sql
@?/rdbms/admin/catmet2.sql

— recompile dbms_metadata_int to enable the diffing code
alter package dbms_metadata_int compile plsql_ccflags = ‘ku$xml_enabled:true’;

— recompile dbms_metadata_util to enable the xmlschema load code
alter package dbms_metadata_util compile plsql_ccflags = ‘ku$xml_enabled:true’;

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NOTE: If warnings are received after running the catmet2.sql and the alter
packages for dbms_metadata_int and dbms_metadata_util like below :

Received “Warning: Package altered with compilation errors.”

Please recompile those packages manually and re-run catmet2.sql:

alter package DBMS_METADATA_INT compile body;

alter package DBMS_METADATA_UTIL compile body;

@?/rdbms/admin/catmet2.sql

========================================================================================

The system didn’t have a XDB user, and likely because of this, the two “alter package” commands invalidated the dbms_metadata objects. The subsequent recompilations all failed. On advice from Oracle support, we ended up backing out the patch and re-applying without running these “alter package” commands, and confirmed that DBMS_METADATA works fine.

So if you don’t have XDB installed, skip the “alter package” commands. I hope the README is updated soon.