Oracle® OPatch User's Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2) for Windows and UNIX Part Number E15294-01 |
|
|
PDF · Mobi · ePub |
Interim patches are bug fixes available to customers in response to specific bugs. They require a particular base release or patchset to be installed before they can be applied. They generally address specific bugs for a particular customer. These patches are not versioned and are generally available in a future patchset as well as the next product release.
This chapter discusses the following topics on interim patches:
Interim Patch Versions
Retrieving Interim Patches
Interim patches generally come in a zipped format. You need to unzip them before you apply a patch. Figure 2–1 illustrates the structure of interim patches.
Interim patches contain the following items:
Patch Metadata — Information on the patch ID, bugs fixed, files affected, and actions to be performed.
Payload — Files that OPatch will modify.
Custom Scripts — Pre-processing and post-processing scripts that need to be run before and after patching.
OPatch 10.2 supports maintaining versions of patches. You can have two or more different versions of the same patch (with the same patch ID). This version information is stored in the OPatch metadata.
The metadata has a tag date_of_patch
that stores the patch version information. The following sample shows the tag:
<date_of_patch year="YYYY" month="mmm" day="Day" time="Time" zone="TimeZone"/>: Date on which the patch was created
This tag records the time Oracle created the patch. If the same patch is created at a later time, this tag will record that time.
Note:
This version information is the time Oracle created the patch and not the time of patch application in the host.For example, consider a patch with ID 300200 and the date_of_patch
tag in the patch metadata as follows:
<date_of_patch year="2008" month="Dec" day="23" time="04:57:13 hrs" zone="US/Eastern"/>
OPatch considers this version of the patch to be created on December 23rd, 2008 at 04:57:13 hours.
When you apply an interim patch to an Oracle home, OPatch stores the patch information in the $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage
directory. Inside this directory, separate directories are created for each patch applied to the Oracle home. You can only apply one version of the patch in the system at a given time.
You can determine the location of the patch information directory by executing the opatch lsinventory -detail
command and looking for the patch location storage area information in the output, as shown in the following example:
Patch Location in Storage area: /home1/HOMEtoiir571/.patch_storage/300200_Dec_23_2008_04_57_13
You can also find an unzipped version of the patch in the following location:
$ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage/<patch_id_timestamp>/original_patch