At times you may want to uninstall a maintenance upgrade. You can use Smart Update to revert your system installation to an earlier version of the release, as described in the following sections:
When you uninstall a product, any patches that may have been applied to that product are not removed. This consideration is important if patches for multiple products in a given Middleware home directory are applied to the same patch profile, and you uninstall one product but continue to use the others. When this situation occurs, products that you continue using run with patches for the product that has been uninstalled.
If you have multiple products installed in a single Middleware home directory, and you have a domain that exclusively uses only one of those products, it is a recommended best practice to use custom patch profiles for that domain so that server instances run with only the patches that have been applied to the products used by those servers. For information about pointing a domain at a custom patch profile, see Chapter 6, "Patching Individual Applications, Domains, or Servers."
Smart Update makes it easy to remove a patch or patch set that has been applied to a patch profile.
Note:
Installation-scoped shared archive patches cannot be removed from a custom profile: they can only be removed in the default profile. In this case, similar to the installation, the patch is removed from the default profile and all custom profiles to which it was initially applied.Start Smart Update.
In the Target Installation pane, select the product installation hosting the patch you want to remove.
Select the Manage Patches tab.
Select the patch profile containing the patch or patch set you want to remove.
Click the Remove button with the down arrow, located to the right of the patch you want to remove.
In the Remove Patch from Profile dialog, click OK.
A validation dialog box is displayed. If you are removing one patch on which another depends, a removal conflict is reported, which you must resolve before proceeding. For information about resolving patch removal conflicts, see Validation When Removing Patches. The patch removal progress is tracked in the status window. A message is displayed when the removal is complete.
Shut down any running WebLogic Server instances, and restart them for the patch removal to take effect.
Note:
If you remove a patch that belongs to a patch set, the entry for the patch set is removed from the listing of the patch profile contents from the Downloaded Patches panel. However, other member patches of the set that have not been removed continue to be listed in those locations.Maintenance packs to products can be rolled back; after installing a maintenance pack to a product, such as WebLogic Server, you can roll back to the previous maintenance pack installation. For example, if you first install WebLogic Platform 9.2, and then install Maintenance Pack 1, you can later revert the installation to the initial release: WebLogic Platform 9.2.
Notes:
If you revert to an earlier installation, user-created domains may stop working because of changes made in each domain config.xml file between service or maintenance packs. If you have a backup copy of each config.xml file used with the earlier maintenance pack, you should use it after you revert the installation.You cannot roll back to a previous version of a product if that previous version was never installed on your system.
A new operational attribute, orclguid, was added to the Embedded LDAP server as of WebLogic Server 10.3.1. Therefore, if you need to downgrade from a WebLogic Server 10.3.x installation to WebLogic Server 10.3.0, see Updating the Embedded LDAP Schema, before proceeding with the downgrade.
Start Smart Update.
In the Target Installation pane:
Select the Middleware home directory and installation containing the maintenance pack you want to roll back.
Maintenance packs that you can uninstall (or roll back) are displayed in the Downgrade Options section of the window.
In the Downgrade Options pane, select the maintenance pack that you want to uninstall and click OK.
The Oracle Uninstaller program opens and the Welcome window is displayed.
Click Next to proceed.
The progress of the uninstall process is reported in a status window. A message is displayed when the rollback or uninstallation is complete.
Click Done on the status window.
The Smart Update window is displayed. To close it, choose File > Exit.
A new operational attribute, orclguid, was added to the Embedded LDAP server as of WebLogic Server 10.3.1. Therefore, if you installed a WebLogic Server 10.3.x maintenance pack (patch set) to an existing WebLogic Server 10.3.0 to a later 10.3.x version, and then need to downgrade to the 10.3.0 installation, Oracle recommends that you upgrade the Embedded LDAP schema in your 10.3.0 installation to the schema version in the later installation. Otherwise, you may see the following LDAP error after downgrade:
LDAPException: error result (65); Missing Attributes: [], NotAllowed Attributes: [orclguid]
To upgrade the Embedded LDAP schema:]
Prior to downgrading to the 10.3.0 installation, save a copy of the following schema file to a temporary directory:
WL_HOME\server\lib\schema.core.xml
After downgrading to the WebLogic Server 10.3.0 installation, replace the schema file in the WebLogic Server 10.3.0 installation with the schema file you saved to the temporary directory.