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  Author: Arup Nanda

In this article I will discuss the best practice about multiple Oracle Homes. It is recommended to create a new Oracle Home and apply the patches there instead of applying a patch or a patchset against existing Oracle Home.

The flow will be as follows

  • Create the first Oracle Home at /app/oracle/db_1.
  • When a patch comes out then install the whole Oracle software in a different home -- /app/oracle/db_2 – and apply the patch there.
  • During the process of installation and patch application, the database is up and running, as it runs off the home /db_1.
  • When the outage window come then shut down Oracle, change Oracle Home to db_2 and bring the database up.
  • If there is a problem then reset the Oracle Home back to the old one.

Conventional Practice

New Practice

In the below procedure the steps 2 and 6 could take as much as three hours depending on the amount of patching. The database is down during these times.

In the below procedure the database is down only during steps 4 and 8, which takes a couple of minutes at the most, not hours.

  1. Shut down the database
     
  2. Apply patch to the Oracle Home
     
  3. Start the database
     
  4. In case of problems:
     
  5. Shut down the database
     
  6. Roll back the patch
     
  7. Start the database

 

  1. Install new Oracle Home
     
  2. Apply the patch to the new Home
     
  3. Shut down the database
     
  4. Change Oracle Home to the new location
     
  5. Start the database
     
  6. In case of problems:
     
  7. Shut down the database
     
  8. Change Oracle Home to the old one
     
  9. Start the database

Advantages:

Below are the advantages of the new approach

Reduced Down Time:

The downtime is significantly reduced to one 60th of the original time.

Reduced Risk:

By using new approach you just go to the older version. There is no rolling back a patch and hence the risk is reduced significantly.

Identifying Differences: 

You can identify the change by performing a diff on these two homes. You can see the differences across multiple homes as well.

Several Databases to new Oracle Home:

You can take several databases running on the same server to the new Oracle Home one by one.

Inventory:

Using the inventory can help you get an insight into various Oracle Homes and what patch level they are on.

Disadvantages:

The only disadvantage of the approach supported in this article is the space consumption. The space for two Oracle Homes is required. However, as a typical Oracle Home takes about 4 GB or less so this aspect of the suggestion is trivial.

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