Staged Patching ApproachSession 12125

Vasu Balla

The Pythian Group

About Me

Oracle Apps DBA with 10+ Years of ExperienceOracle Apps ATG Customer Advisory Board Member Oracle EBS Cluster Technical Lead at Pythian

@vasuballa

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About Pythian

Agenda

•What is Staged Patching For?

•How Staged Patching works?

•Best Practices

•Future of Staged Patching in R12.2

What is Staged Patching for?

Reasons

•Cut downtime for patching

•Exhausted all other options like distributed AD, merging patches etc

•Best fit for large patches like Maintenance Packs

Adpatch stages•Copy Portion

- Copies files from patch to appltop

- Relinks Executables

- Compiles JSPs

- Generates jar files

Adpatch stages•DB portion

- Updates PLSQL pkgs, Table & Index definitions

- Loads or Updates Data & Compiles Invalids

•Generate portion

- Generates forms & reports

Where it saves time ?

Copy Portion

DB Portion

Generate Portion

How Staged Patching works?

First Step - Clone

•Clone Production to Stage instance

•Need to make sure that architecture is same

•Set appltop name same as production

•Freeze all production changes during stage instance patching

Apply Patches to Stage

•A typical EBS patch updates both middle tier files and DB objects

•Apply All the required patches on Stage

•Make sure to document all fixes for any failed patch jobs

Prepare for production

•Merge all AD/FND patches into one bundle and rest of the patches into another bundle

•Document any required manual post patching steps

Production Cutover

•Shutdown PROD Apps Services

•Point STAGE instance appltop tnsnames to PROD

•Apply patch bundle with nocopyportion and nogenerateportion options from STAGE instance

•When adpatch is running, Start copy of STAGE apps_st and tech_st to PROD

•You should not copy INST_TOP which contains the report logs and other configuration files

•Use utilities like rsync for the copy

Production Cutover Contd…

Finish Cutover

•After patch completes from STAGE env, remove the PROD tnsentry

•Complete any documented manual steps

•Start Production Services and release

Migrate Patch History•Export patch history from stage env

$ perl $AD_TOP/bin/adphmigr.pl userid=apps/apps \

startdate='2013/01/01 00:00:00' enddate='2013/04/01 00:00:00' \

appsystemname=stage appltopname=AT_appnode1 nodatabaseportion=Y

•Copy generated adpsv*txt and javaupdates*txt to $APPL_TOP/ admin/$TWO_TASK on PROD

•Run adpatch in PROD and abort when it prompts for driver file, to upload history

1

2

3

Best practices

•Keep SID of STAGE env different from PROD

•Keep apps Passwords different

•Run Maintain current view snapshot in PROD before STAGE clone

•Leverage SAN/NAS features for Copy

It’s Better

R12 upgrades

•Not supported to use 12.1.3 staged appltop for upgrade from 11i

•Need to first upgrade to 12.1.1 using staged appltop and then upgrade to 12.1.3 using another staged appltop

•Staged appltop is best suited for point release upgrades 11.5.9 to 11.5.10.2 and 12.0.6 to 12.1.3

Future of Staged Patching

Future of Staged Patching

•In R12.2 Staged patching is already built in

•We have 2 apps file systems

•Two copies of DB objects using Edition Based Redefinition

•Its called Online Patching

R12.2 Dual filesystem

R12.2 FS layout

Online Patching Cycle

Questions? Comments?

THANK YOU

Vasu Balla

balla@pythian.com

@vasuballa #C13TCH #C13DEN

www.pythian.com/blog