ocm

The long way to patch 28

introduction

this is not a raw technical discussion of how to install oracle patch sets or how to circumvent known patch set bugs. this is a run down presentation of my most annoying experience of installing oracle software lately. an expression of anger about intransparent documentation structures and versioning, permanent manual intervention, enormous effort in time and cost and, finally, inefficiency. but let’s see what happened.

i recently installed the so called Release 10.1.0.5 Patch 28 for Microsoft Windows (32-Bit) on a lab- and a couple of production-machines. so far, everyone knows that installing oracle patches is not an easy job. you need to figure out what patch to install actually and download the patch for a dedicated database and operating system software version. mostly, the actual patch, to be applied properly, requires other patches to be applied a priori and a posteriori. in the case of the mentioned patch, which is a bundle of interim patches, even the patch installer OPatch had to be patched in advance. but that’s not the whole story. wrapped within the newer OPatch oracle automatically distributes OCM, the oracle configuration manager.

to sum it up i had to take regard of the following patches, in that order:

  1. p6880880_101000_WINNT – installs a newer OPatch and hooks in OCM
  2. p5746866_10105_GENERIC – fixes timezone files
  3. p7367493_10105_WINNT – my actual intend

applying this series of patches may be executed in two ways, depending on whether you already know about the hidden OCM-introduction.

(more…)