On October 27th Oracle hosted a webcast of Sysadmin-oriented Preview of EBS 12.2. It was an enlighting webcast, which gave a very good idea about things coming up in Release 12.2. Today I want to discuss about one prominent feature of upcoming Oracle E-Business suite Release 12.2, which is Online patching feature. Below the screengrab of a slide from presentation gives a nice overview of the feature.
Oracle introduced redundency at the filesystem level also. There will be two appltops , two common tops, two inst_tops, two 10.1.2 oracle homes and two Weblogic oracle homes. One of the filesystem will be called Run Edition and other the Patch Edition. Online users will be served using the Run Edition and when we apply a patch using adutilities, it will update the Patch Edition. Once patches are applied successfully to Patch Edition, the DBA needs to switch the Patch Edition into Run Edition. After the switch is done, the DBA needs to synchronize both the Filesystems.
At the database level, this will use 11g new feature called “Edition-Based Redefinition”. It will maintain different version of packages in the database, facilitating online patching feature.
We all know how difficult it is to rollback a apps patch in 11i & R12.1. Oracle will now support rolling back of a patch in R12.2 and this online patching enables that. Only downside of this feature is, it will use double the disk space on the server.
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[…] in the promise of new, shiny things (Fusion Apps) and major improvements in the way we work (e.g. online patching in EBS 12.2). Believe me, we’re chomping at the bit to dive into these technologies. We can’t wait […]
[…] significantly by using “Edition Based Redefinition” (EBR) at the database level and using a secondary applications file system for online patching. In fact, all patching activity will be an online operation; downtime will be required only to […]
[…] significantly by using “Edition Based Redefinition” (EBR) at the database level and using a secondary applications file system for online patching. In fact, all patching activity will be an online operation; downtime will be required only to […]
I have installed R12.2 from https://www.freeoraclehelp.com/2012/02/oracle-applications-122-installation.html.
Do you have any instructions on patching?
Thanks, Suresh K.
I’d like to hear some real life experiences with adop!
For myself, patching used to be my one of my favorite activities out of the typical DBA duties. With adop it has turned into a frustrating experience. It just takes soooo looong to apply a simple patch. Datafix patch delivering two sql scripts to the filesystem in hotpatch mode takes 1hr 40mins, the whole adop is wrapped into a web of overhead all over the place trying to substitute human factor as much as possible. One does not see what is happening from the adop output, so you have to open 2 more sessions where you tail the logs, but there are new ones being created on the fly for each phase, so you need to keep changing the files to tail. While you are trying to work on something else you constantly bump into these windows and wonder is it doing something? Ah okay it’s doing the pre-checks of the pre-phase or post-check in the post-phase :) I’m over exaggerating bit here. Yes, in most cases eventually it gets the job done. But my confidence with the tool hasn’t been great.
As for the online patching, we have not been able to complete simple error less online patch session including all phases. As simple as that.
We’re on codeline 12.2.4.
Anyone begs to differ?