7 Uninstalling Patches

At times you may want to uninstall a patch or patches. You can use Smart Update to revert your system installation by removing patches that you have installed:

• Important Note about Uninstalling Products

• Removing a Patch

• Uninstalling a Service Pack, Maintenance Pack, or Upgrade

Important Note about Uninstalling Products

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.

Removing a Patch

Smart Update makes it easy to remove a patch 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.

Removing a patch or patch set

To remove a patch or patch set, complete the following steps:

1. Start Smart Update.

2. In the Target Installation pane, select the product installation hosting the patch you want to remove.

3. Select the Manage Patches tab.

4. Select the patch profile containing the patch or patch set you want to remove.

5. Click the Remove button with the down arrow, located to the right of the patch or patch set that you want to remove.

6. In the Remove Patch from Profile dialog box, 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.

7. 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.

Uninstalling a Service Pack, Maintenance Pack, or Upgrade

You can use Smart Update only to remove individual patches. You cannot use Smart Update to remove a service pack, maintenance pack, or version upgrade that was installed using an Upgrade installer. To remove such upgrades, use the WebLogic Server uninstall program. See "Uninstalling the Software" in the Installation Guide for Oracle WebLogic Server.